This is my annual list of DjangoCon US talks I’d like to see. I have been doing this since 2015, and it’s one of my favorite traditions.

DjangoCon US 2026 is in Chicago this year, August 24-28.

The CFP is open. The deadline is March 23, 2026 at 11 AM CDT. Submit a talk!

Past editions

Drew’s Topics

Drew Winstel published a great list of talk ideas for DCUS ‘26 with over 20 ideas. Here are some of my favorites from his list. Any of these would make good talk ideas, so check out Drew’s full list too.

  • GPTs, LLMs, and AIs, oh my!
  • Deployment at any size
  • Unexpected use cases, especially ones that make the world better
  • Clever hacks (such as Carlton Gibson’s single-file Django project)
  • Using Django in machine learning projects
  • New features in Django 6.x
  • Development and testing techniques that help you build better code
  • Convincing product management that you don’t need a SPA or yet another mobile app
  • Personal growth: how the community helped you in some way and you’d like to pay it forward
  • Adapting communities to changes in life

My Topics

Here are some topics that I’d personally like to see this year.

What’s coming in Python and Django

With some big shifts coming in Python 3.15 and 3.16, it would be really interesting to see more about what Django developers would benefit from knowing about what’s coming up. Something a little more core to Python would be interesting.

I’d also love to see more Django talks, whether it’s from the Steering Council or anybody working on features for the Django 7 series. What’s coming? What are the big features being tackled?

Django’s deployment story

Last year I was on a panel called Two Decades of Django: The Past, Present, and Future. During that panel, I challenged people to really look into Django’s deployment story and find ways to improve it. If we can remove one or two steps along the way, we can make the deployment story better.

A couple of projects came out of that conversation that I really liked, including Django Prod Server. Anything that makes deployments better and reduces the number of steps is worth exploring. If anybody has topics around improving Django’s deployment experience, that would be a great one to discuss.

Rust in our ecosystem

I’d like to hear more about Rust in our ecosystem. Tools like uv, Ruff, and Pydantic are all built with Rust. Pydantic led to Django Ninja and other applications built around it. Are you using Rust in your Django applications? Why? Where are you building with it? How is it improving your workflow? Is it for linters? Code formatters? Are you solving performance bottlenecks with Rust? What should Django learn from Rust? Which parts of Django would be better if rewritten in Rust? That story is really fascinating to me.

LLMs and Django

I’d like to see more LLM talks about the amazing things people are building. This could be with Pydantic AI, creating model agents, or things you’re building that either run Django websites or help people do amazing things with agents. What does it look like to give a functional brain to a Django app? That would be an interesting talk idea.

Agent skills and productivity

I’d also like to hear about agent skills. How are you improving your productivity? How are you taking some of the drudge work out of working with Django? What skills do you use? What problems are you solving that a skill helps you with? What should Django learn from LLMs, skills, and agents? That would be another interesting topic.

Real talk about LLMs and team productivity

There are a lot of talks about the negative things about LLMs and AI, and I think that is respectable and understandable. But it has become taboo for some weird reason that people who use LLMs every day aren’t speaking out about it and aren’t talking about the productivity gains they get. Especially if you’re on a small team doing a lot of stuff.

If you’re working with a bigger team and everybody’s using these tools, how are you managing it? How are you getting through pull review processes? How are you making your code better? What’s working? What didn’t work? What’s scaled up for you?

Everything is changing in our industry whether we like it or not. Agents are here. The companies as of today are not going anywhere and the bubble hasn’t burst. I’m really curious about team productivity. What do you like? What don’t you like?

Defending and embracing LLM traffic

On the flip side with LLMs, so many things have changed in the last year that we have to be a little more defensive with our websites, whether that’s using CDNs like Cloudflare or Fastly. I’m really interested in what people are doing to scale their servers now with LLMs in mind.

Some people may or may not want to make their websites more LLM friendly. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages to doing that. Writing a website to be consumed by LLMs is an interesting topic, both defensively and in terms of how you take advantage of it.

Submit a talk

You can always go back to my 2024 list and of course there’s Drew’s list too. Some of the best topics that will be submitted will be things that don’t fit either of our lists. The whole idea is just to give people a starting point for things we’d both personally like to see, but that shouldn’t limit your imagination.

Outside opinions are great. Not everything needs to be about Django. We always get a bunch of community talks and talks that don’t have to be about the tech. But I think it’s an exciting year to really dig deeper into some of the tech because so much is changing on a weekly basis.

Submit your talk for DjangoCon US 2026!