Jeff Triplett

DjangoCon: DjangoCon US Talks I’d Like to See: 2018 Edition

Filed under: djangocon

Continuing in the tradition of my 2017 and 2016 “DjangoCon US Talks I’d Like to See” posts, here is an update for 2018.

Once again, our DjangoCon US 2018 CFP deadline on June 3rd is approaching, and in case you need some inspiration, I wanted to share some talk ideas.

If public speaking isn’t your thing or if you want to help review proposals, we could use your help too. If you have a topic in mind that you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll add it to my list.

Who do we want to hear from?

Everyone brings a new perspective and voice to our program. We’d love to hear from passionate voices regardless of how long you have been in our industry.

You don’t have to be a Python or Django developer to submit a talk to us. In fact, some of our best talks each year come from outside of our community.

Pro-tip: Encourage someone to speak

Whether you submit a proposal or not, please consider encouraging someone else to submit a proposal. I have encouraged dozens of people to give first-time talks over the years, and it’s one of the most personally rewarding experiences for me.

If you encourage someone and have a story you’d like to share, please consider reaching out to me and let me know.

What others want to see

Both of these lists are great, so check them out before you read about my ideas. There is probably some overlap here.

Deep Dives

With the announcement that Django: Under the Hood (DUTH) has been sunsetted, I’d love to see more deep drive proposals in the same spirit that DUTH inspired.

Maybe you want to propose a deep dive into a Core Django feature like caching, forms, generic views, the ORM, URLs (new path syntax), etc. and how they work?

Maybe you want to propose a deep dive into a favorite third-party library like Django Channels, Django REST Framework, Wagtail, or one of the thousands that I missed?

We have longer talk slots which are perfect for deep dives.

What’s new in Django 2.x

These talks are always well received. I’d love to see a talk which gives an overview of what’s new as a whole or a deep drive if the topic warrants it.

Since there are too many of these to accurately list, here links to the release notes of what’s changed since last year:

MOAR

  • Mariatta Wijaya gave a great talk at PyCon 2018 about What is a Python Core Developer?. In that spirit, What is a Django Core Developer?

  • Having ran a large scale application successfully through Zappa and AWS Lambda, I’d love for someone to give talk about Zappa again.

  • More GraphQL talks.

  • I’d love to see a large scale Django case study. It has been a while since we have had a good case study, but maybe this year is a good year to bring one back.

  • We haven’t had a panel in a few years which is a shame because we have had some excellent ones.

Django Community

  • State of the DSF. Last year we had a joint meet and greet for the DSF and PSF board members to say hi. Maybe a state of the DSF by the DSF Board which is part-talk and part-panel where they can discuss goals and core values might be a good format.

  • I would like to hear more from Django Core developers. We have a lot of new attendees every year who want to help, and I think we are missing out by not having more Django Core devs on sight to interact with. This could easily be a panel too.

What else?

I’m cutting my list short this year because many of the ideas I mentioned last year are still relevant plus Lacey and Sara covered a lot of ground.

Feel free to let me know on Twitter ) what you wish to hear, and I’ll add them here like I have done in previous years.

Good luck!

Updates

2018-06-01 - What you said you want to see!