13 Mar 2026
Django community aggregator: Community blog posts
Django News - 21 PRs in One Week to Django Core! - Mar 13th 2026
News
The Call for Proposals for DjangoCon US 2026 has been extended one week!
DjangoCon US 2026 has extended its Call for Proposals deadline by one week to March 23 at 11 AM CDT, giving prospective speakers a little more time to submit their talk ideas.
CPython: 36 Years of Source Code
An analysis of the growth of CPython's codebase from its first commits to the present day
Releases
Python 3.15.0 alpha 7
Python 3.15.0 alpha 7 introduces explicit lazy imports, a new frozendict type, improved profiling tools, and JIT upgrades that deliver modest performance gains while development continues toward the upcoming beta.
Django Software Foundation
DSF member of the month - Theresa Seyram Agbenyegah
Theresa Seyram Agbenyegah features as DSF member of the month for March 2026, highlighting her Django community leadership and PyCon organization work.
Updates to Django
Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Johanan from Djangonaut Space! 🚀
Last week we had 21 pull requests merged into Django by 11 different contributors - including 2 first-time contributors! Congratulations to KhadyotTakale and Lakshya Prasad for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!
This week's Django highlights:
-
Fixed TypeError in deprecation warnings if Django is imported by namespace. (#36961)
-
Improved admin changelist layout for object-tools button. (#36887)
-
Fixed migrate --run-syncdb crash for existing model with truncated db_table names. (#12529)
Django Newsletter
Django Fellow Reports
Fellow Report - Jacob
Two cool features landed this week: @Antoliny0919's more standard vertical layout for inputs and labels in admin forms, and Artyom Kotovskiy's work to make RenameModel migration operations update permission names as well.
Lots of tickets triaged, reviewed, and authored!
Fellow Report - Natalia
This week had as the main attraction the security releases I issued on Tuesday (6.0.3, 5.2.12, and 4.2.29), which required the usual coordination, strong focus, and intense follow-up.
Beyond that, a significant part of the week was spent navigating the continuing wave of LLM-generated pull requests, which adds a fair amount of noise to the review queue. After prioritizing the security work, I tried to reclaim some joy in the day-to-day Fellow work by digging through long-snoozed notification emails and picking off a number of lingering tickets and PRs that had been waiting for attention.
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Articles
New Feature Proposal for Django - AddConstraintConcurrently
More context on a recent proposal suggesting a pair of opt-in contrib.postgres operations - AddConstraintConcurrently and RemoveConstraintConcurrently - to allow unique indexes created via UniqueConstraint to be created and dropped concurrently.
Avoiding empty strings in non-nullable Django string-based model fields
Django silently converts None values in non-nullable string fields into empty strings, but a simple CheckConstraint can enforce truly required values and prevent empty data from slipping into your database.
Buttondown - How we check every link in your email
The machinery behind Buttondown's link checker is more involved than you might expect.
The State of OpenSSL for pyca/cryptography with Alex Gaynor and Paul Kehrer
The written transcript of an interview all about Python security/cryptography, current features in cryptography, as well as some of what's coming in the future.
Year of the Snake Recap
Mariatta's review of the year showcases how prolific she was, with conferences, documentaries, ice cream selfies, and much more.
What is `self`?
Eric Matthes tackles the age-old questions that is asked many times by newcomers, but is always worth revisiting.
I Ditched Elasticsearch for Meilisearch. Here's What Nobody Tells You.
A practical deep dive into replacing Elasticsearch with Meilisearch, showing how a simpler Rust-based search engine cut costs from $120 to $14 a month while delivering faster, typo-tolerant search for typical application workloads.
Videos
From Kenya to London - Velda Kiara
The video version of Django Chat and this week's guest, Velda. We won't always do a double-feature of episodes, but Velda is always sunny and uplifting even amidst these last legs of winter.
Python Unplugged on PyTV - Free Online Python Conference
If you missed it live last week, there was a digital conference hosted by PyCharm featuring several Django speakers including Sarah Boyce (Fellow), Carlton Gibson (podcast host), and Sheena O'Connell (PSF Member). Timestamps in the description!
Podcasts
Django Chat #197: From Kenya to London with Django - Velda Kiara
Velda is a software engineer at RevSys based in London and an extremely active member of the Python and Django communities. She is a PSF Fellow, former Djangonaut, co-maintainer of django-debug-toolbar, regular conference speaker, and Microsoft MVP.
Django Job Board
Explore new opportunities this week including a Solutions Architect role at JetBrains, an Infrastructure Engineer position at the Python Software Foundation, and a Lead Backend Engineer opening at TurnTable.
Solutions Architect - Python (Client-facing) at JetBrains 🆕
Infrastructure Engineer at Python Software Foundation
Lead Backend Engineer at TurnTable
Django Newsletter
Projects
Lupus/django-lumen
Visualize your Django models as an interactive ERD diagram in the browser. No external diagram library - the diagram is pure vanilla JS + SVG rendered at request time from the live Django model registry.
paradedb/django-paradedb
Official extension to Django for use with ParadeDB.
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13 Mar 2026 3:00pm GMT
11 Mar 2026
Django community aggregator: Community blog posts
Weeknotes (2026 week 11)
Weeknotes (2026 week 11)
Last time I wrote that I seem to be publishing weeknotes monthly. Now, a quarter of a year has passed since the last entry. I do enjoy the fact that I have published more posts focused on a single topic. That said, what has been going on in open source land is certainly interesting too.
LLMs in Open Source
I have started a longer piece to think about my stance regarding using LLMs in Open Source. The argument I'm thinking about is that there's a balance between LLMs having ingested all of my published open source code and myself using them now to help myself and others again.
The happenings in the last two weeks (think Pentagon, Iran, and the bombings of schools) have again brought to the foreground the perils of using those tools. I therefore haven't been motivated to pursue this train of thought for the moment. When the upsides are somewhat questionable and tentative and the downsides are so clear and impossible to miss, it's hard to use my voice to speak in favor of these tools.
That said, all the shaming when someone uses an LLM that I see in my Mastodon feed also annoys me. I'll quote part of a post here which I liked and leave it at that for the moment:
The AI hype-cyclone is bad, but so is the anti-AI witch hunt. Commits co-authored by Claude do not mean that a project has "abandoned engineering as a serious endeavor"
[…]
Other goings-on
- Health: My back continues to improve. Some days are still bad, but the idea that the herniation may go away entirely doesn't sound totally unreasonable anymore.
- Gardening: We started weeding the garden last week. Lots to do! Being outside is fun. Weeding isn't the greatest part ever, but it's meditative.
Releases since December
- django-json-schema-editor 0.12.1: CSS fixes. I have again looked at other, more modern JSON schema editor implementations but all of them are more limited than is acceptable to act as a replacement.
- django-debug-toolbar 6.2: I haven't done much work here! Just some reviewing.
- django-content-editor 8.1: Started emitting warnings when using non-abstract base classes for plugins. Using multi table inheritance is mostly an accident and not intended in my experience when using django-content-editor, therefore we have started detecting this case and emitting system checks (warnings, not errors).
- django-imagefield 0.23.0a3: We have done some work on supporting libvips as an alternative backend to Pillow because I hoped that memory usage in Kubernetes pods might go down a bit. Results are not conclusive yet, and I'm not yet convinced the additional code complexity is worth it. Debugging and monitoring continues.
- FeinCMS 26.2.1: Released a few bugfixes. FeinCMS is still being maintained ~17 years later!
- django-auto-admin-fieldsets 0.3: Added a helper to remove fields from the fieldsets structure.
- django-tree-queries 0.23.1: Shipped a small bugfix for
{% recursetree %}which unintentionally cached children across invocations. - feincms3-downloads: Used
PATHfrom the environment instead of using a very restricted allowlist so thatconvertandpdftocairoare detected in more locations. This should help with local development for example on macOS. - django-prose-editor 0.24.1: Read the CHANGELOG; there's too much in there for a short notice.
- form-designer 0.27.3: Mosparo captcha support, bugfixes and additional translations.
- feincms3 5.5: Started using the
OrderableTreeNodefrom django-tree-queries.
11 Mar 2026 5:00pm GMT
From Kenya to London with Django - Velda Kiara
🔗 Links
- Velda at RevSys
- Velda's Substack: The Storyteller's Byte Tales
- Velda on GitHub
- Optimal Performance Over Basic as a Perfectionist with Deadlines
- More about me
- Neapolitan
📦 Projects
📚 Books
- A History of the Bible by John Barton
- Python Mastery, a course from David Beazley
- Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
🎥 YouTube
Sponsor
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11 Mar 2026 4:00pm GMT