BACK
DjangoCon Europe is run by the community for the community: which is what makes it just the kind of event we absolutely love to attend. The 11th edition took place in Copenhagen, from 10 to 14 April, and we sent 4 Mirumeers along to get involved in the discussion and workshops that aim to educate and develop the skills of the growing Django community.
It was a fun event that gave us a fresh perspective on the current state of Django… and the ramen was pretty good too!
Untamed Creativity
A good conference starts with a great space, and DjangoCon delivered in an inspiring and unusual way. The Academy for Untamed Creativity is a place normally dedicated to the training of circus arts to people who want to get into the entertainment industry. It offered the kind of playful, creative environment that was ideal for a group of developers looking to push technological instead of physical boundaries.
Standing room only
We were able to make our own contribution to the event in a workshop, run by Marcin Gębala, Project Lead of Saleor, and Patryk Zawadzki, our Head of Tech, presenting the basics of building GraphQL servers in Python using Ariadne.
We started with the most important concepts then worked through creating an example query with a resolver and a mutation. We also wanted to give a sneak peek into Python of the future — asynchronous subscriptions with Ariadne, Django Channels 2.0, Starlette, and asynchronous database access!
With 40 people attending, it was standing room only by the time we kicked things off. It showed a lot of excitement for what we are doing and convinced us that we are at the forefront of async Python, helping to shape the future of web development in Python. Many developers still don’t see the full value of the async model, or of changing from familiar tools to accommodate a new way of doing things, but we are strong advocates for taking that step and were excited by the response we received.
We’ll be sharing more about the talk and a full tutorial in a future post, so keep a look out over the coming weeks. For now, you can see the slide from the talk here:
Creating a GraphQL API in Python: from Django to fully asynchronous
Docs or it didn’t happen
If you have ever seen Mikey Ariel in action, it will come as no surprise that her “Docs or it didn’t happen!” talk was one of the absolute highlights of the conference. Developers often overlook documentation but writethedocs.org does such an awesome job of providing writing aids and workshops to advocate for better practices. The talk offered up a lot of nice tools and resources and was a great example of passionate people spending their time and effort to make technology better for the whole community.
It’s something that also speaks clearly to us in our current projects. We’ve kicked off work on Saleor Cloud, a hosted version of our e-commerce platform, and we had already decided that a docs-first approach was the way to build the right technology.
Follow Mikey on Twitter and get in touch with your docs side.
The future of Django
One of our main takeaways from the conference was that async is the future of web frameworks; it is generally on the rise in the Python community but is not widely adopted in the Django community yet. It is a similar story with GraphQL, but the amount of talk we heard from people over the course of the three days told us that change is coming.
It was great that Tom Christie, an author of the Django Rest Framework, and a leading figure in the Django community, sees things the same way that we do. He talked about a move towards asynchronous architecture and presented some experimental tools that he’s working on such as an async web framework and async database drivers. We were also stoked that he also mentioned our own Ariadne project as an emerging Python tool.
We were also excited to have a chance to chat to with Tom after this presentation and dive deep into ASGI. We’re definitely going to continue supporting ASGI and the Starlette stack and are looking forward to what the future brings there.
Next on the agenda, Marcin Gębala will be speaking at PyCon Italia in Florence and PyConWeb 2019 in Munich, before we head to the GraphQL conference in Berlin in June. we are sincerely hoping for more circus acrobatics and some really great ramen.
