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The Six Feet Up team had a blast at this year’s DjangoCon Europe, hosted virtually on LoudSwarm by Six Feet Up from June 2-4, 2021. The event featured talks from industry experts about nearly every facet of Django — from frontend deployment to backend best practices, APIs and Django REST framework, it was all covered! Plus, there were engaging lightning talks and excellent networking opportunities via Gather.Town with our Django-loving friends from around the world. 

While it was incredibly hard to narrow them down, below, we’ve included a list of our 7 favorite talks.* For more event highlights, check out Six Feet Up’s live Twitter feed.  

Top 7 Talks from DjangoCon Europe 2021:

1. “Programming for Pleasure” by Daniele Procida

Daniele’s talk brought to light a cultural concern within the developer community: because it’s fun to develop applications that solve complex problems, it may be more difficult for programmers to fully understand the end user pain points. However, understanding the issues and pain points of the end user is critical to developing top-notch products. Daniele suggests that to solve this conundrum, we need to make programming less fun, which will give developers the opportunity to truly focus on the problem at hand. Read the Twitter thread here.

2. “How to be a djangonaught in a climate emergency” by Chris Adams

The first keynote of DjangoCon Europe 2021 was presented by Chris Adams, the organizer of climateaction.tech. His talk showcased how fellow technologists can have a measurable impact on the current climate emergency. “You can think of the tech sector as having a carbon footprint of around 1% to 3% of global carbon emissions,” said Adams. 

3. “Full Stack Web with Nothing but Python” by Meredydd Luff

Anvil’s founder, Meredydd Luff, discussed the Zen of Python — “Simple is better than complex.” — and shared tips for how to avoid over-engineering your workflow. If you know everything there is to know about the web, and everything there is to know about Django, how do they stack up with Python best practices? Read the Twitter thread here.

4. “Your very own real time chat with Django Channels” by Amanda Savluchinske

Amanda’s tutorial walked attendees through how to get started with Django Channels and showcased the endless possibilities — a great introduction prior to Calvin’s talk about Hacking Django Channels (see more below). Read the Twitter highlight here.

5. “Dynamic Static Sites with Django and Sphinx” by Carlton Gibson

Sphinx is a fantastic tool for building documentation, but it also helps make the Django documentation possible. Carlton highlighted the MyST tool — a Markdown parser for Sphinx — in his talk on how to create dynamic static sites. MyST is an important addition that allows programmers to use Django to serve content, given auth, forms, interactivity, custom content and more.

6. “How to create a full-stack, reactive website in Django with absolutely no JavaScript” by Adam Hill

In a well-illustrated presentation, Adam discussed how a Django application would work if there was no JavaScript involved. He demonstrated several JavaScript frameworks that support add-ons to Django to create a reactive front-end application. 

7. "We're all part of this: Jazzband 5 years later” by Jannis Leidel

Last — but certainly not least — Jannis’ keynote discussing the Jazzband project’s impact on the Django community and lessons learned from hosting the project for the last five years. He highlighted the project’s sustainability practices and how they are working with their volunteers to maintain the project.

*Because we know we’re biased, we excluded the two talks given by our CTO and AWS Community Hero, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, in the above list. Calvin’s talks gave attendees a behind-the-scenes look into how LoudSwarm by Six Feet Up was built — including: 

• how Six Feet Up hacked Django Channels to seamlessly integrate Slack into the virtual event platform via “Hacking Django Channels for Fun (and Profit),” and 
• how Six Feet Up used containers to implement a process that focuses on the developer experience and application delivery via “Deploying a Django Virtual Event Platform Using Containers and Terraform.”  

Which talks were your favorite? Let us know in the comment box below, and if you’re interested in a one-on-one conversation, you can schedule your free consult now. 

See you next year, DjangoCon Europe! 

According to the event organizers, “Our conference seeks to educate and develop new skills, best practices and ideas for the benefit of attendees, developers, speakers and everyone in our global Django Community, not least those watching the talks online.”