I will be in Chicago this Saturday through next week for DjangoCon US 2025 (September 8-12). I hope to see people there in person. If you can’t make it, please consider getting an online ticket. They are relatively inexpensive, you get three full days out of them, and they help support the conference. More importantly, it helps support future conference events so we can continue to offer virtual attendance. It’s important that our online sales do well enough to help us cover our online costs and help fund our grants, along with our annual Django Software Foundation donation.

With an online ticket, you get to watch talks live and after the fact, probably a month before they come out on YouTube. You’ll have more interaction with people who are at the conference than you would get otherwise, plus the convenience of watching whenever you want. You can watch them live or on a time delay. You can join late, watch while we’re on breaks and at lunch, catch up, and join us in real time. Buying a ticket gives you the ability to watch whenever you want. If you are buying your own ticket, they’re $99. If your employer is buying you a ticket, it’s $199. So please buy a virtual ticket and enjoy over 50 excellent talks over three days. I’ll even be on a panel.

If you’re in Chicago and want to meet up at the conference, let me know. I will be around the venue all week and hope to sprint on some new and old projects, including work on Django Packages. If you want to talk about the Django News projects I’ve been working on, like Django News, Django TV, Django News Jobs, and Awesome Django.

DjangoCon US has been a good excuse for me to launch a few projects over the years, including Django News Jobs two years ago and Django TV last year. This year, I’m working on something too, and I’m probably going to release it sooner than I would typically do. I’m trying to figure out what would be a fun and useful project for the community. I’d love to talk to people about what that project is.

Topics I’d Love to Discuss at DjangoCon US

I really enjoy meeting new people whom I’ve met online, but I know that’s sometimes hard for people whom we have never met in person before. Conferences can be awkward and scary; we’ve all been there. Here’s a list of topics to help break the ice in case you find any of these interesting and want to talk more about them.

Django Development

• Side projects and making them sustainable
• The deployment story for Django
• Better production defaults in Django
• Better ways to run a project and get projects up quickly
• Growing Django community projects to the next level

AI and LLM Topics

• What MCP looks like for Django
• AI-driven development with Claude Code
• Projects built with LLMs (I’ve got several that are 99%+ AI-written)
• How AI can help with open source development

Django Software Foundation & Sustainability

We just hired a Django fellow for the Django Software Foundation, and fundraising is really top of mind. As we’ve grown to have three fellows and an assistant, we need to make the fellowship program more sustainable and fundraise for an executive director who can help guide Django’s future. I’ve been on the board for less than a year, and it’s way more work than any of us expected. We have a very engaged board, but we need to make this more sustainable for the next board.

I’d love to talk about:

• How to make it more engaging for companies to support the DSF
• Making the fellowship program and Django community projects more sustainable
• Growing projects I’ve been working on with Will Vincent to provide more community value

New Django releases are great and help drive a lot of good, but I’d also love to see our side projects grow to that next level of sustainability.

How to Reach Me

Feel free to reach out to me - I’m on Mastodon, which is probably the best way to get a hold of me. I’ll also be on the conference Slack. I’ll be helping to organize a bit, but I hope to have plenty of time to talk to and meet people in person. I am definitely open and available if people want to connect and meet in person.

I’m also a partner and a consultant at REVSYS in Lawrence, Kansas. If you’re having company problems and you would like to talk to either me, Frank Wiles, or one of my colleagues, we’d love to talk to you. You may be experiencing problems that we can help with, or your company is too busy, and you could use an extra set of hands. Or maybe you need some advice on how to get AI working with your company. We’ve done a lot of real-world projects for a while, and I’ve spent a couple of years with AI. I’m always happy to talk about that.