DjangoCon 2011 @Amsterdam

Django, Amsterdam and a wonderful community: just few words to summarize the Djangocon Europe event.

<ahref foundation took part in the european conference on Django in Amsterdam from the 6th to the 10th of June, 2011.

As soon as the tickets where available I realized that in a few weeks time they were all sold out, which impressed me much. Another amazing thing was the number and diversity of people coming from many different countries just to share their knowledge, thoughts and experiences. I think that was great testament to the power of open source. The daily schedule was composed of 8 talks and ended with the possibility for every participant to do a presentation about some interesting topics.

Some developers of big web sites spoke about how they created them. Andy McKay from Mozilla described their migration from PHP to Django on high traffic web sites like Firefox. Jesper Noehr explained the infrastructure of Bitbucket (a free code hosting site for Mercurial which was bought by Atlassian some years ago) and how it was born. Prezi was also  present with a developer to talk about their development cycle with a focus on their continuous integration system.

Then there was the founder of ep.io, a python hosting site which was born after the DjangoCon 2010; he spoke about their adventure which at first seemed like it would be quite easy, but actually was incredibly difficult.

Generally, the discussions focused on very hot topics like mobile and realtime. Idan Gazit talked about responsive web design, a way forward in building web sites. Some developers illustrated their Django application in order to get community feedback, one great example being the comparison between three CMS(Fiber, djangoCMS and Merengue).

There were also highly technical discussions regarding framework. Alex Gaynor, for example, illustrated pypy, a Python interpreter and JIT compile, which allows existing applications to be faster wihtout changing any of the source code.
The conference ended with a 24 hours sprint in which all participants attempted in their own way to contribute to the Django project.
In conclusion I want to thank this beautiful and generous community for giving me three unforgettable days.

See you next year in Zurich.

(By Martino Pizzol)