My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025

https://www.zachbellay.com/posts/djangocon-eu-2025/

by SCUSKU • 1 year ago

115 112 1 year ago

fidotron• 1 year ago

Are people choosing Django for new projects much these days?

pabe• 1 year ago

Yes. Still one of the best batteries included web frameworks for creating anything that's more of a website (e.g. E-Commerce) than a web app (e.g. Photoshop). No, you don't need NextJs and friends for everything ;)

zerr3• 1 year ago

What would be the same that is for a statically typed language?

sgt7• 1 year ago

Absolutely. For what it does, Django is pretty much the best full stack Python web framework there is. It's also a great way to rapidly develop (just sticking to synchronous, which Django is best at).

One can then later consider spinning certain logic off into a separate service (e.g. in Golang), if speed is a concern with Python.

leoh• 1 year ago

I’m not sure there’s a better full stack platform in any other language really?

gymbeaux• 1 year ago

Someone just sent me a job opening for an engineer to work on a startup’s PHP backend and Python “everything else”. Absolutely insane.

JodieBenitez• 1 year ago

yes

bnchrch• 1 year ago

Just like Python itself, unfortunately yes.

ashwinsundar2• 1 year ago

Would love to hear an honest discussion of why Django and/or Python is a bad solution for any given problem. Is it because they are old technologies? Do they lack support for something in particular? Are they too expressive/not expressive enough?

seabrookmx3• 1 year ago

Not in my org. Though we did choose it for _one_ new project recently, mostly because we re-used some code from another Django project we had, and we wanted to lean on some readily available functionality from jazzband libs.

We have a few FastAPI services, but are mostly moving away from Python for projects > 1kloc.

nine_k• 1 year ago

What are you moving towards? Node/TS? Golang?

haneul4• 1 year ago

Why moving away from Python at that threshold?

cjauvin• 1 year ago

For a complete solution requiring many traditional high-level components like templating, forms, etc, then yes, clearly Django. But for something looking more like a REST API, with auto-generated documentation, I would nowadays seriously consider FastAPI, which, when used with its typed Pydantic integration, provides a very powerful solution with very little code.

wahnfrieden2• 1 year ago

Django Ninja?

ashwinsundar2• 1 year ago

I chose Django + htmx and a small amount of Alpine.js for a full-stack software project that is currently being launched. I had zero professional experience with Django (or Python really) before starting. I was able to develop the entire application on my own, in my spare time, and had time left over to also handle infrastructure and devops myself.

I prefer Python and it's web frameworks over Typescript/React because there is a lot more stability and lot less "framework-of-the-week"-itis to contend with. It's much easier to reason about Django code than any React project I've worked on professionally. IMO when you don't have a firehose of money aimed at you, then Python is the way to go

sgt7• 1 year ago

Yes, you can do the whole web app (or web site if you will) like that without any complicated dependencies. This will be great if you touch the project only now and again e.g. the typical side project that you want to still work in the year 2030 without major changes.

Yet the approach also scales up to enterprise grade project, leveraging DRF, Django-cotton and so on (and htmx).

tcdent3• 1 year ago

I just rolled a backend using FastAPI and SQLAlchemy and it made me miss Django.

Too much other stuff going on in this app to incorporate Django, but it's still way ahead of the curve compared to bringing together independent micro frameworks.

thenaturalist• 1 year ago

Out of naive curiosity of considering your first stack vs. Django: What makes Django so way ahead of the curve?

sgt7• 1 year ago

It's brave trying FastAPI if you haven't tried it before. Going async is going to be quite different and you need to be more careful when designing your API. Most people will never need it.

This is why most folks just needing a plain Python API without anything else, they usually go for Flask, which is vastly simpler. For a more complete web app or site, I would recommend Django.

BiteCode_dev3• 1 year ago

django-ninja will give you a fastapi like experience without the hassle

the__alchemist3• 1 year ago

You bet. Still the easiest (IMO) for websites, perhaps of any language.

ipaddr• 1 year ago

It easy but having separate app spaces by default instead of just one like Laravel makes it slightly harder for just a website case.

rowanseymour3• 1 year ago

If it's the kind of project that is going to run against one PostgreSQL database then I'd probably start a new project with Django just for its database migration support. That doesn't mean everything in the project has to be Django.

haneul4• 1 year ago

Is pretty equivalent to alembic autogenerate, no?

vFunct• 1 year ago

LLMs are experts at Django, as there's 20 years of training data on it as well as just being written in the world's most popular language. LLMs can pump out full featured Django sites like anything.

I don't know why anyone would use any other framework.

fhd23• 1 year ago

All the time.

1. Very easy to find developers for. Python developers are everywhere, and even if they haven't worked with Django, it's incredibly easy to learn.

2. Simple stuff is ridiculously fast, thanks to the excellent ORM and (to my knowledge fairly unique) admin.

3. It changes surprisingly little over time, pretty easy to maintain.

ranger_danger• 1 year ago

My only criticism is that die-hard django devs constantly brush aside the admin and can't stop telling people not to use it. I think it's a huge mistake.

It's extremely well-designed and extensible, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel when so much time and effort has been put into it.

They will complain of things like "eventually you will have to start over with a custom solution anyway"... but whatever gripes they have, could just be put into improving the admin to make it better at whatever they're worried about.

Personally I've not run into something I couldn't make work in the admin without having to start over. My own usecases have been CRUD for backoffice users/management and I've had great success with that at several different companies over the last ~15 years.

People will say "it's only for admins you trust" yet it has very extensive permissions and form/model validation systems heavily used in the admin and elsewhere, and they are easily extensible.

ropable• 1 year ago

We've used (and continue to use) Django for bespoke applications for a decade and a half now. It continues to be the most well-supported, well-governed, well-documented, batteries-included, extensible web framework of all the ones we've tried. Finding developers with experience using it (or upskilling them) is easy. As a choice of web technology, it's one of those that we've never regretted investing in.

atoav• 1 year ago

just did, and I really like it.

jgalt212• 1 year ago

That's sort of like asking if people choose Python for new projects these days.

tiffanyh• 1 year ago

Didn’t Meta build Threads.com on Django?

(Since Threads was based on the IG tech stack, and IG is a modified Django stack)

neural_embed• 1 year ago

Some of the talks look really interesting — are there any YouTube videos linked? I couldn’t find those.

SCUSKU• 1 year ago

The conference coordinators said they would be released in about a month, so I will update the post once they are released! I am really excited to watch them again. Amazingly informative stuff.

benwilber03• 1 year ago

Always use a BigInt (64 bits) or UUID for primary keys.

Use bigint, never UUID. UUIDs are massive (2x a bigint) and now your DBMS has to copy that enormous value to every side of a relation.

It will bloat your table and indexes 2x for no good reason whatsoever.

Never use UUIDs as your primary keys.

rowanseymour3• 1 year ago

And assuming we're not talking v7 UUIDs.. your indexes are gonna have objects you might commonly fetch together randomly spread everywhere.

LunaSea2• 1 year ago

But if you use sequential integers as primary key, you are leaking the cardinality of your table to your users / competitors / public, which can be problematic.

outside12342• 1 year ago

If you don't have a natural primary key (the usual use case for UUIDs in distributed systems such that you can have a unique value) how do you handle that with bigints? Do you just use a random value and hope for no collisions?

hellojesus5• 1 year ago

Wouldn't you just have an autoincrementing bigint as a surrogate key in your dimension table?

Or you could preload a table of autoincremented bigints and then atomically grab the next value from there where you need a surrogate key like in a distributed system with no natural pk.

benwilber03• 1 year ago

You use a regular bigint/bigserial for internal table relations and a UUID as an application-level identifier and natural key.

varispeed• 1 year ago

Is it really enormous? bigint vs UUID is similar to talking about self-hosting vs cloud to stakeholders. Which one has bigger risk of collision? Is the size difference material to the operations? Then go with the less risky one.

rowanseymour3• 1 year ago

You shouldn't be using BIGINT for random identifiers so collision isn't a concern - this is just to future proof against hitting the 2^31 limit on a regular INT primary key.

gruez• 1 year ago

Use bigint, never UUID. UUIDs are massive (2x a bigint) and now your DBMS has to copy that enormous value to every side of a relation.

"enormous value" = 128 bits (compared to 64 bits)

In the worst case this causes your m2m table to double, but I doubt this has a significant impact on the overall size of the DB.

TylerE• 1 year ago

The concern isn’t the sign of the db on disc but doubling the size of all the indexes in memory

sgarland10• 1 year ago

When you have a few million rows, no. When you have hundreds of millions or billions of rows, yes, it matters very much.

zerr3• 1 year ago

Wasn't UUIDs default go to types for primary keys in the .NET/SQL Server world even 20 years ago?

hu32• 1 year ago

I don't think so.

Even Microsoft default sample database schema uses INT ids.

bsder• 1 year ago

Never use UUIDs as your primary keys.

This seems like terrible advice.

For the vast, vast, vast majority of people, if you don't have an obvious primary key, choosing UUIDv7 is going to be an absolute no-brainer choice that causes the least amount of grief.

Which of these is an amateur most likely to hit: crash caused by having too small a primary key and hitting the limit, slowdowns caused by having a primary key that is effectively unsortable (totally random), contention slowdowns caused by having a primary key that needs a lock (incrementing key), or slowdowns caused by having a key that is 16 bytes instead of 8?

Of all those issues, the slowdown from a 16 byte key is by far the least likely to be an issue. If you reach the point where that is an issue in your business, you've moved off of being a startup and you need to cough up real money and do real engineering on your database schemas.

sgarland10• 1 year ago

The problem is that companies tend to only hire DB expertise when things are dire, and then, the dev teams inevitably are resistant to change.

You can monitor and predict the growth rate of a table; if you don’t know you’re going to hit the limit of an INT well in advance, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Re: auto-incrementing locks, I have never once observed that to be a source of contention. Most DBs are around 98/2% read/write. If you happen to have an extremely INSERT-heavy workload, then by all means, consider alternatives, like interleaved batches or whatever. It does not matter for most places.

I agree that UUIDv7 is miles better than v4, but you’re still storing far more data than is probably necessary. And re: 16 bytes, MySQL annoyingly doesn’t natively have a UUID type, and most people don’t seem to know about casting it to binary and storing it as BINARY(16), so instead you get a 36-byte PK. The worst.

benwilber03• 1 year ago

contention slowdowns caused by having a primary key that needs a lock (incrementing key)

This kind of problem only exists in unsophisticated databases like SQLite. Postgres reserves whole ranges of IDs at once so there is never any contention for the next ID in a serial sequence.

sgarland10• 1 year ago

I’ll go further; don’t automatically default to a BIGINT. Put some thought into your tables. Is it a table of users, where each has one row? You almost certainly won’t even need an INT, but you definitely won’t need a BIGINT. Is it a table of customer orders? You might need an INT, and you can monitor and even predict the growth rate. Did you hit 1 billion? Great, you have plenty of time for an online conversion to BIGINT, with a tool like gh-ost.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

I work for a company that deals with very large numbers of users. We recently had a major project because our users table ran out of ints and had to be upgraded to bigint. At this scale that's harder than it sounds.

So your advice that you DEFINITELY won't need a BIGINT, well, that decision can come back to bite you if you're successful enough.

(You're probably thinking there's no way we have over 2 billion users and that's true, but it's also a bad assumption that one user row perfectly corresponds to one registered user. Assumptions like that can and do change.)

pyuser5832• 1 year ago

Gosh this debate again.

I’ll be 110 years old telling my great-grandchildren about how we used integers for primary keys, until reason arrived and we started using uuids.

And they’ll be like, “you weren’t one of those anti-vaxxers were you?”

tpm4• 1 year ago

I was in the never-UUID camp, but have been converted. Of course depends on how much do you depend on your PKs for speed, but using UUIDs has a a great benefit in that you can create a unique key without a visit to the DB, and that can enormously simplify your app logic.

sgt7• 1 year ago

I also do that for convenience. It helps a lot in many cases. In other cases I might have tables that may grow into the millions of rows (or hundreds of millions), then I'd absolutely not use UUID PK's for those particular tables. And I'd also shard them across schemas or multiple DBs.

sgarland10• 1 year ago

I’ve never understood this argument. In every RDBMS I’m aware of, you can either get the full row you just inserted sent back (RETURNING clause in Postgres, MariaDB, and new-ish versions of SQLite), and even in MySQL, you can access the last auto-incrementing id generated from the cursor used to run the query.

hu32• 1 year ago

I made a ton of money because of this mistake.

Twice now I was called to fix UUIDs making systems crawl to stop.

People underestimate how important efficient indexes are on relational databases because replacing autoincrement INTs with UUIDs works well enough for small databases, until it doesn't.

My gripe against UUIDs is not even performance. It's debugging.

Much easier to memorize and type user_id = 234111 than user_id = '019686ea-a139-76a5-9074-28de2c8d486d'

gitroom• 1 year ago

Pretty cool seeing how people still go for Django even with so many new frameworks, always makes me wanna go back to it when stuff gets messy tbh

explodes• 1 year ago

I haven't used Django in about 10 or 12 years but I cracked it open the day. It was cool to see all the things I loved are largely unchanged; I was able to step right back in.

BiteCode_dev3• 1 year ago

The ecosystem has improved thought. django-ninja is great for API, django-coton brings component supports and you have better options than celery for qeueing.

Scarblac• 1 year ago

There is buzz around the combination of Django and HTMX, worked on by the same people in one team, as a much simpler alternative to split frontend and backend teams with a REST API in between (and perhaps NextJS as well, etc).

Arbortheus• 1 year ago

Django is still great.

I recently upgraded two ~10 year old aging legacy applications at work. One was in Flask, and one in Django. This made me appreciate the "batteries included" philosophy of Django a lot more.

Even though the django legacy application was much larger, it had barely any extensions to "vanilla django". Comparably, the flask application had a dozen third-party flask-* dependencies that provided functionality like auth, permissions, and other features that Django has built-in. Many of these dependencies were archived/abandonware and hadn't been maintained in a decade.

When it came to upgrading the Django app, I had one giant release notes page to read. I didn't need to switch any packages, just make some pretty simple code changes for clearly documented deprecations. For the Flask app I had to read dozens of release notes pages, migrate to new maintained packages, and rework several untested features (see: legacy application).

In my mind, "batteries included" is an underrated philosophy of Djangoo. Also, it is now such a mature ecosystem it is unlikely there will be any radical breaking changes.

Perhaps there are some parallels to draw with newer trendy (but minimalistic) python frameworks like FastAPI.

If I were building a web application I wanted to last a decade or more, Django would be up there in tech choices - boring and sensible, but effective.

flakiness• 1 year ago

It looks like htmx is popular in the Django community. Is there any background story that made this? (Context: Just picked Django for a hobby project. Don't know much about Webdev trend beyond, like, what are talked about on the HN top page.)

wahnfrieden2• 1 year ago

Server side template rendering is popular already and well supported in Django ecosystem

tmnvix• 1 year ago

Thanks for the summary. Looking forward to the videos becoming available.

I talked to this speaker afterward, and asked him how they did nested modals + updating widgets in a form after creating a new object in a nested modal. He showed me how he did it, I've been trying to figure this out for 8 months!

Do share!

seanwilson• 1 year ago

It's easy to get something quick working with HTMX and Django, but if you want robust UI tests that actually test what happens when users click stuff, don't you need to use something like Playwright? This can be pretty heavy, slow and flaky, compared to regular Django tests?

I find with HTMX, it can introduce a lot of edge cases to do with error handling, showing loading progress, and making sure the data on the current page is consistent when you're partially updating chunks of it. With the traditional clunky full-page-refresh Django way, you avoid a lot of this.

My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025

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