19 Sep 2026

feedDjango community aggregator: Community blog posts

Python: join my optimization workshop in Lisbon, 10th October

I'm running a workshop in Lisbon next month, and you're invited!

It's a small, in-person, hands-on session on optimizing Python code, with a Django flavour. Here are the details:

Register on Luma

What we'll do

In my experience, Python projects often have some easy performance improvements waiting to be found, from client projects to large open source projects like Django itself. This workshop is designed to teach you how to find the hot spots worth optimizing, using these three tools in a loop:

  1. Capture a profile with cProfile, Python's built-in profiler.
  2. Drill into it with profiling-explorer, to find where the time actually goes.
  3. Prove your change worked with tprof, which measures just the functions you care about and can compare before against after.

I'll teach the loop end-to-end on a real example. Then we'll spend most of the morning using it for real, and you can pick your target:

  • Django itself.

    I'll bring a small collection of potential optimization targets in the Django codebase. You can try out the loop optimizing them, figure out if there are safe and worthwhile optimizations to be made, and potentially make a pull request to Django itself. I'll help shepherd the promising ones towards being merged after the workshop.

  • Another project.

    If you'd rather point the tools at something else, like another open source project or a work codebase, feel free. We can still work together to find some gems.

We'll try working in pairs, and at points we can chat as a group to compare notes on what we've found.

There's a break in the middle, with coffee, tea, and pastries provided.

Who it's for

Intermediate and experienced Python developers. Django experience is helpful, especially if you want to work on Django itself, but it isn't required. The tools and the loop are plain Python, and the "your own project" track works with any codebase.

You don't need to have profiled anything before.

What to bring

A laptop, with Git and a recent Python version installed. I'll send setup instructions to everyone who registers, a week or so beforehand. It only takes a few minutes, but please do it before you arrive, so we can spend the time on the interesting parts.

This is a workshop, not a talk, so we'll be talking and coding together throughout the session.

Register

Register on Luma

There are only ten places in order to keep the session manageable, so please stick to your registration.

Fin

I hope to see you there.

Optimize all the things!

-Adam

19 Sep 2026 4:00am GMT

18 Sep 2026

feedDjango community aggregator: Community blog posts

Issue 355: DjangoCon Europe 2027 in Innsbruck and Django Probe

News

Executive Director Search Extended to September 22

You don't need to be a Django or Python expert, or already part of the community, to apply for the DSF's first Executive Director role. Applications now close September 22, anywhere on Earth.

DjangoCon Europe 2027 is heading to Innsbruck, Austria! 🏔️⛷️🚠🇦🇹

Tickets are on sale and the Call for Proposals is open for five days of Django, Python, and community in Innsbruck, February 17 to 21, 2027.

Django Software Foundation

DSF Board monthly meeting, Sept 10, 2026

The board approved DEP 0019, discussed next steps in their Executive Director search, committed to funding Djangonaut Space for the next three years, later launched a new corporate sponsorship page, and more.

Python Software Foundation

Announcing the 2026 PSF Board Election Results!

Elaine Wong, Laís Carvalho, Ee Durbin, and Georgi Ker take the four open board seats out of 670 ballots cast, as Cheuk Ting Ho, Chris Neugebauer, and Denny Perez finish their terms.

Announcing the 2026 Python Packaging Council Election Results!

The first Python Packaging Council is seated: Brett Cannon and Pradyun Gedam on two-year terms, Donald Stufft, Henry Schreiner, and Ralf Gommers on one-year terms, so roughly half the council turns over each year.

Announcing the PSF Strategic Plan 2026

Feedback on the June draft reshaped the PSF's five-year plan, which now adds security baseline and vulnerability management objectives, folds translation into accessibility, and clarifies how companies can fund specific work.

Updates to Django

Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Raffaella from Djangonaut Space! 🚀

Last week we had 9 pull requests merged into Django by 8 different contributors - including 3 first-time contributors! Congratulations to Loïc LEFEVRE, Paul K. Gerke and Rickey Shideler for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!

Thanks to the persistence of the contributors, a great deal of work has been done on the dajngo-admin yes-icons to make it rectangular, which helps people with dichromatic viewing deficiencies.

Kudos for the great work updating the tutorial and cleaning up a section to help newcomers focus on the essentials.

Django Fellow Reports

Django Fellow Report - Natalia

A quieter week, with a mix of security work, reviews, and follow-ups from ongoing work. I spent a good chunk of time on a security report that needed a second triage, including a detailed review of the proposed patch 🔎.

I also wrapped up more of the follow-through from DEP 20 by adapting the release checklists to the new release calendar, and resumed a PR to make EmailValidator more flexible.

And, in particularly happy news 🥳, we welcomed two new members to the Ops Team and two to the Security Team 🎉. I'm thrilled to see both teams growing!

Django Fellow Report - Sarah

This week was quite admin heavy but all positive things! The usual tickets triaged, reviewed, and authored, as well as four security issues, and lots of meetings.

Django Fellow Report - Jacob

An early report for about a day at my desk before heading out for some vacation. Multiple tickets reviewed and authored, along with security/ops/steering council/Fellows meetings.

Sponsored

Simple APM dashboards for Python. Set up in just 5 minutes

Drowning in data? Honeybadger gives you Just Enough APM™ without enterprise bloat or cost.

Our dev-friendly APM dashboards expose metrics and trends across your apps and infrastructure, so you can find and fix Python issues before users notice!

Articles

Django: introducing django-mcpz, for making MCP servers

Because the new MCP version is stateless, a server is just a Django view: route path("mcp", server), decorate functions that take an HttpRequest, and msgspec validates arguments against schemas generated from your type annotations. No ASGI or Channels needed.

Share how you use Django with Django Probe

Tim Schilling wants decisions about what Django adds or deprecates to rest on more than gut feel, so django-probe counts which Django classes, methods, and functions your codebase actually uses and submits the tally. Sign up at djangoprobe.org, then scan and submit.

The Ultimate Question of Architecture, the Universe and Everything

Four projects, one lesson: make being wrong cheap.

Django Management Command for Bulk Import

A walkthrough of writing a custom Django management command to bulk import data.

Django: serve the change password well-known URL

One RedirectView at /.well-known/change-password lets password managers send users straight to your change password page, and Django's default 404s already pass the spec's check for servers that answer 200 to everything.

The PyLadiesCon Portal Was Spammed: 2,249 Fake Accounts. Four Months Before Anyone Noticed

A bot signed up 2,249 accounts on a Django volunteer portal to borrow its sending reputation for email bombing, and at 30 a day nobody noticed until fake accounts were 91% of the database. The fixes: django-simple-captcha, per-IP hourly rate limits, and a scheduled purge of unverified accounts.

Creating Web Widgets Using the Document Picture-in-Picture API

Picture-in-picture isn't just for video: this API floats any HTML in an always-on-top window, and the display-mode: picture-in-picture media query keeps your CSS from breaking once a component leaves the page. Desktop Chrome and Firefox only for now.

Django Forum

Add Plausible Tracking to DjangoProject.com?

Plausible tracking is now live on djangoproject.com and docs.djangoproject.com. This was a long-running discussion over the past 2 years. Thank you to everyone who participated.

Events

Django on the Med - Sept 23rd to 25th

The second Django on the Med development sprints are taking place next week in beautiful Pescara, Italy.

Django Day Copenhagen 2026 - October 2nd

Djangonauts from in and around Denmark are meeting up for the 6th edition of Django Day Copenhagen, to be held on October 2nd. It will be a full day of talks, either to be experienced online -or- at our venue.

Sponsored

Automatic translations on every pull request

New strings in your .po files, translated on-brand before they merge. Localhero runs as a GitHub Action, with a review page where the whole team can tweak the copy. No export, no re-import, no sync step to forget. Rails YAML and JSON too.

Django Job Board

The DSF's search for its first Executive Director, now open through September 22, leads this week's board, alongside a new Django role at The Developer Society, machine learning work at Provision, and a backend seat at The Cruise Brothers.

⭐ Executive Director at Django Software Foundation

🆕 Django Developer at The Developer Society

Machine Learning Engineer (Hybrid) at Provision

Django Developer at The Cruise Brothers

Projects

codingjoe/django-letter

Write an email once as a Django template, and django-letter sends it as HTML with inlined CSS plus a plain-text alternative derived from the same markup.

adamchainz/django-mcpz

The package behind the article above, for building MCP servers inside a regular Django project.

18 Sep 2026 3:00pm GMT

17 Sep 2026

feedDjango community aggregator: Community blog posts

September Python Leiden meetup summaries

Two summaries from the September 2026 https://pythonleiden.nl/.

Maintaining Python packages to attract free and open source software contributors - Steve Piercy

Steve is in the Netherlands for next week's Plone conference in Maastricht (NL). He's been involved in open source software for over two decades.

What are contributors? Contributors to open source software? Why do you do it? Learning (I myself got a good programming education out of contributing to Zope/Plone while still at the university). You might want to give back. You might like the community, you like to belong to the community. Finding your tribe. Perhaps build a resume or CV. Help other people.

Why not? Negative online reactions. You want to really make money out of it. AI slop. You might not have time. Too busy. Life happens. You might enjoy walking your dog or doing gardening more. Or perhaps you just don't know how! Or you don't feel experienced enough (imposter syndrome). Perhaps you don't think your English is good enough (he advocates just using Google Translate).

(He asked how many people had already contributed to open source: about half the room raised their hands.)

There are actually lots of ways to contribute. It is not all code! Read this page for some examples. You can report security vulnerabilities or issues. You can comment on issues and help getting them forward. Review pull requests. Extend the documentation. You can join discussions in forums or on Matrix. Write a blog post on a project. And... you can financially sponsor a project.

(He again asked who had contributed: now most hands went up!)

Where to start? Start with what you use and what you find interesting. This helps staying involved and getting into the community more and more. He himself liked web applications and especially forms: making sure they're intuitive and safe and well-validated. And he liked documentation, so some of his first contributions were documentation fixes for open source projects.

Recently, he volunteered to take over maintainership of an open source project (a sphinx extension). There were lots of open pull requests and he asked the owners to look at it again and perhaps tweak it a bit and... everybody responded and a few weeks later he could make a new release with lots of fixes.

What is a maintainer? Well, basically maintainers are contributors who make releases. But ideally you also have to "tend your garden" and try to get your small community to thrive. One thing to keep in mind: you have to put your ego aside. If it is open source, it is really owned by your users, not by you. What do you have to do? Show up when someone has a question. Document your project (how to contribute, how to report bugs and security issues, etc.).

He especially mentioned https://djangonaut.space , that's a great initiative to help people get involved with contributing. Same with https://djangogirls.org/ .

As a maintainer, you might also have to look for funding. There are options like "github sponsors". But also NLnet (from the Netherlands) and the German sovereign tech agency that sponsor lots of projects.

A best practice of good maintainers is to have good tooling. Automatic tests + coverage. Build documentation. Formatting checks. zest.releaser for good releases.

The most important part of being a maintainer: how do you treat people.

There's one big problem: AI. There are just too many pull requests and too many issues. You can never get through them if your project is reasonably project. Dealing with it is hard. Several projects made the choice to disallow AI contributions. Also read https://leidendeclaration.ai/ , for the same problems are entering math and science, too.

But on the other hand... in the icalendar project that he helps maintain, they got a new contributor that made his first contribution based on AI. He liked that: the person got enough confidence through AI. They now have an AI guideline in their contributor guide now.

There's are automated tools on github that can help you check pull requests and identify slop-generating accounts, for instance. A tip when confronted with suspected AI work: ask vague, clarifying questions. Just ask for a bit of clarification in a vague way: AIs can't respond to vague questions, but humans can.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Frank Herbert, Dune. Funny that he could write that 50 years ago.

Something mentioned in the discussion: people are now bidding on real github accounts in order to let AI bots use accounts that appear real...

Watch out with AI. One of the links he shared: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/09/08/students-who-dont-use-ai-are-ahead-on-every-measure/ . And, look at the kids: it was bad enough with social media, but AI is much worse. And freelancers are getting buried with soulless AI slop cleanup: artists get to clean up AI-generated images, for instance.

Choose wisely. A quote he wanted to give us to think about: teach the world you want.

Monitoring my washing machine - Michiel Beijen

Michiel has a 2021 Samsung washing machine that plays Die Forelle by Schubert when it is finished washing... But the washing machine sits in the garage so he can't hear the sound. It is a smart machine, so there's an iphone app for that! "SmartThings". But the list of data it wants to collect about you is horrendeous. And the app is almost 1GB! No...

There's also "home assistant", written in python. There's even a SmartThings API connection. But... from October 2026 onwards you need a $5/month samsung subscription!?!

There's also "Matter". They call it vendor neutral, standards compliant. Samsung supports it. But only for connecting Matter devices to SmartThings, not the other way around.

Next try: put a small camera in front of the washing machine's display, add a bit of OCR text recognition to detect the remaining time from the image and add an http interface to it. An old webcam couldn't provide a good camera. A raspberry Pi Camera 3 did the trick. (He later thought it would perhaps have been better to pick some old smartphone.)

He showed some graphs detailing how the washing machine estimates the time it will finish, including the adjustments it made halfway (adjusting for load or so).

Another approach that a colleague of him took: use a monitoring plug that measures the electricity used. Once the electricity usage drops off, the wash is finished.

17 Sep 2026 4:00am GMT