This was DjangoCon Europe 2016

Every year the Django community organisers an amazing event somewhere in Europe aptly named DjangoCon Europe. Last year’s conference in Cardiff was amazing … and so was the 2016 edition in Budapest 💖

The whole conference had even more of a music flavor going on compared to previous events. The location was a music hall, your conference badge was a music tape and there plastic saxophones everywhere!

If you’ve been following my posts on my travelogue you already know the details. There were tons of amazing talks and it was (as always) hard to pick favourites. That being said, the biggest surprise for me was one by Bashar Al-Abdulhadi where he described the evolution of localised software for Arabic over the last decades and how the community worked on offering translations et al. for Django and its ecosystem. The most amazing aspect was here for me a language called Arabish where the Arabic alphabet was translated to ASCII (including numbers).

On the technical side of things Andrew Godwin’s talk about Django Channels was - as expected - amazing 😊 I can’t wait to have them land in the core, which will hopefully happen with Django 1.10 in the next couple of months. In the meantime I’ve already added them to an internal project where I needed Websockets and they’ve worked great so far 💖

As was the case in Cardiff last year, also this year’s event had a big focus on the human side of software development. Most of us eventually run into situations where stress among other things are starting to reach an unhealthy level. Right after the first day’s keynotes Mikey Ariel and Erik Romijn had a great talk about this. Besides talks about this topic there was also a quiet room and a music library if you needed time for yourself. Heck, even at the official party there was enough space to find a quiet spot if you needed one. As always: Much appreciated 😃

Perhaps the only thing in my opinion didn’t work perfectly during the main event were the lunch breaks due to the way the tables were positioned right in front of the buffet. But, if something like that is the only thing I can come up with then the conference was just amazing.

Same goes for the sprints. The location was a co-working space in a run-down building in the heart of the city with its own bar! There was so much space there that you could easily get lost. The venues conference organisers find for sprints will never cease to amaze me 😊 We once again had the gong which heralded the arrival of a merged pull request and … it was getting noisy quickly! Sprints are always something special and if you haven’t been to one yet, you should definitely go to one the next time you get a chance!

On the sprint days I’ve also took some time to explore the city with friends but I’ll most likely write more about that back on the travelogue when I find the time.

At first I thought this might have been the last DjangoCon Europe for me was I didn’t have any serious Django projects for ages but … I don’t need an excuse to come here! So see you next year! Wherever this might end up being…