DjangoCon US returned to Chicago in 2026, bringing together members of the Django community for a week of learning, connection, and collaboration. I caught up with a few members of the Caktus team to hear about their favorite talks and takeaways from this year’s conference.
What did you like most about DjangoCon 2026?
Keanya Phelps: Hosting the global Django community in my hometown of Chicago was in and of itself. Beyond that, one of my favorite highlights was watching first-time speakers take the stage. Seeing new voices step into the spotlight and be embraced by such a welcoming and supportive community was inspirational.
Karen Tracey: I was blown away by the quality of the lightning talks this year; they were without exception interesting and engaging and covered such a wide variety of topics. If you go to a DjangoCon and skip the lightning talk sessions, you’re really missing out!
Gerald Carlton: As a first time DjangoCon attendee and speaker, I loved how welcoming the conference was! The community was so encouraging, and everyone was really easy to talk to. It was nice being able to walk up to someone, introduce yourself, and just start a conversation. I wasn’t sure what to expect so this was definitely one of my favorite things about the experience!
Colin Copeland: I liked the community outings and sprints. I enjoyed tagging along on the early morning Cloud/Bean walk (thanks Aman!) so I could meet and chat with other attendees. Sometimes the hallway track can feel too busy for me, so I appreciated the chance to meet people in a smaller setting. It was also great to connect with Tim Schilling and collaborate on dsd-pythonanywhere together a bit during the sprints.
Tobias McNulty: My favorite part of the conference was definitely the people! Whether catching up with long-time community friends or making new connections, it’s always great to chat and work together in person. During the sprints, Sarah Abderemane and I collaborated on adding a Stripe sandbox to djangoproject.com; it was incredibly helpful to bounce ideas back and forth with a community colleague in real time. Plus, as a partially remote team, DjangoCon is a fantastic opportunity for Caktus colleagues to gather in person and collaborate outside our day-to-day routine.
What was your favorite talk at DjangoCon 2026?
Keanya Phelps: Dawn Wages keynote-Boldly Go, Building Worlds: Is there Room for me on the Bridge resonated with me. Drawing on the lore and themes of Star Trek, Dawn delivered a moving presentation that struck a chord with me. As someone who came into tech via an unconventional route, hearing a Black woman unpack what it means to belong and lead in this industry was both validating and energizing. It’s a talk I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
Karen Tracey: James Stuckey Weber-But did you know the browser already does that. As a web developer who likes to be able to provide full-stack solutions but definitely prefers back-end coding to front-end, it’s great to see all the things the browsers are now providing out of the box so that there is less JavaScript and CSS that needs to be part of our apps.
Gerald Carlton: As a QA Engineer, I’m definitely a little biased. Anything testing related gets me excited. So I’d say my favorite talk was The Testing Pyramid in Practice for Django by Monica Oyugi. But honestly, there were plenty of other talks that weren’t QA related that I really enjoyed too. And the lightning talks were really good as well!
Colin Copeland: It’s hard to pick a favorite! Related to Karen’s keynote, I found Matías Bordese’s talk about django-tasks-fennel interesting, especially as a potential way to explore migrating an existing Celery-based project to use Django’s new tasks framework. Also, I enjoyed Bartek’s Django Photos Over the Years lightning talk, because it was fun to see a wide range of DjangoCon photos over the years (as an amateur photographer myself!)
Tobias McNulty: I absolutely loved Sarah Boyce’s talk, “Keynote: Emails from my Grandad.” Drawing on years of feedback-filled emails from her grandfather–including his critiques of a painting she made–she walked us through the sometimes stressful dynamics of giving and receiving pull request feedback in open source. It was a comedic, emotional start to the second day of the conference and a poignant reminder of how precious human care and attention remain in the age of AI. I highly recommend catching the video once it’s available.
What did you take away from DjangoCon that you are using right now at Caktus?
Keanya Phelps: My favorite takeaway was all about the community vibe. From inspiring keynotes to first-time speakers stepping into the spotlight, DjangoCon reminded me why I love this space. At Caktus, I’m using that spark to keep building a warm, supportive culture where everyone feels confident sharing their work."
Karen Tracey: Not using anything from it yet, but hoping to find time to use some of the information from GeoDjango at City Scale: Spatial Data for Urban Systems in a personal project. The talk was excellent at de-mystifying how GeoDjango can be used easily for common tasks that come up in projects dealing with location information.
Gerald Carlton: Nothing that I’m using right away, but I did leave DjangoCon with a new curiosity about how AI is going to continue to change the way we develop and test code.
Two talks that really got me thinking about this were Pragmatic AI: How to Gain Trust with User-Centered AI Adoption by Meagen Voss and the talk I mentioned earlier by Monica Oyugi, “The Testing Pyramid in Practice for Django.” Both got me thinking more about where AI fits into development and testing and how that might continue to evolve.
Colin Copeland: I’m not sure I can say I’m using anything specific yet! I did appreciate Jacob’s Auto-prefetching with model field fetch modes in Django 6.1 overview. He walked through the various fetch mode pros and cons, which was a useful introduction to the new feature for me and got me thinking about how to substitute it for select_related to help with long-term project sustainability and N+1 queries.
Tobias McNulty: DjangoCon’s hallway conversations often reveal new ways to tackle client challenges. Case in point: a chat with Tim Schilling about django-security-label led me to discover that the PostgreSQL Anonymizer extension can help sanitize data in flight during logical replication, which isn’t possible out of the box in PostgreSQL. Thanks to Tim for the conversation and the tip!
Cover photo by Tim Schilling, used with permission.