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.

As usual, what I write here is my opinion and I don’t speak for anyone else. In particular, this isn’t any sort of official PyCon anything.

Recently, tech conferences have started publishing a new kind of document: a code of conduct or anti-harassment policy [1]. Attendees are being explicitly told that they’re expected to follow these policies.

To some, this sounds patronizing; or like tools for group-think and censorship; or like a bad episode of The Morality Police. To my mind these are all valid criticisms. Most people aren’t jerks, so telling them to “be nice” certainly sounds patronizing. And it’s true that there are plenty of past situations where codes of conduct have been used to silence controversial opinions. And, yes, morality is sometimes relative; imposing one set of morals upon a diverse group isn’t fair.