Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Django Under the Hood 2016 Highlights

I wrote this post in 2016, more than 7 years ago. It may be very out of date, partially or totally incorrect. I may even no longer agree with this, or might approach things differently if I wrote this post today. I rarely edit posts after writing them, but if I have there'll be a note at the bottom about what I changed and why. If something in this post is actively harmful or dangerous please get in touch and I'll fix it.

Videos from Django Under the Hood 2016 are up - check ’em out! As usual, the conference was amazing and the content was fantastic. I really enjoyed all the talks, and they’re all worth your time to talk. Three in particular stood out to me as exceptional highlights:

  1. Ana’s talk on Testing in Django is the single best talk on effective testing of Django apps I’ve ever seen. I really like her technique of explaining Django’s testing APIs by looking at how they changed over time: it does a great job of explaining what problems particular APIs solve, and why you’d use them. Most testing talks don’t do a great job talking about use cases; Ana’s breaks the mold.

    Ana’s talk also taught me about the concept of Mutation Testing and mutpy – concept and a tool that were new to me, and that I’m excited to try out.

  2. Idan’s talk on the JavaScript world was precisely the kind of “Javascript for Python people” that I needed to see. Like a lot of people, I find the pace of change in the JavaScript community to be overwhelming, and it’s been hard to figure out what to focus on. Idan’s overview has helped me figure out what I want to focus my attention on.

  3. Nadia’s talk about OSS funding covered a topic close to my heart, and this she gets right to the heart of the issue. (See also her white paper, Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure.)

    It’s becoming clear that the only way we can really make open source sustainable and non-exploitative is to figure out ways of paying people for their work, but the tactics are complicated. Nadia’s work highlights a path forward, and inspired me with some concrete ideas to improve the situation in the Django community.