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DjangoConfEU, #djangoisland, ended last Saturday. I have my boss to thank for sponsoring the trip. The Île des Embiez off the southern coast of France was a wonderful choice of a location.

The location itself was stunning. And we had the fortune of blue skies for the duration of the conference with the mediterranean temperatures offset by a wonderful breeze. Taking a stroll around the island was a very rewarding experience, with multiple small beaches to enjoy and a rather monstrous goat to be seen - its size and huge horns had become rather infamous by the end of the conference.

The conference started with three days of talks and without going into too much detail - all talks were recorded - the quality was incredibly high. A few stood out from the rest:

• @mjtamlyn’s talk on django.contrib.postgres, which gave a concise overview of the coming enhancements for Django-PostgreSQL integration
• @aymericaugustin’s keynote on “Where the wild things are”, detailing the changes to app loading coming with 1.7
• @jacobburch & @jacobian’s talk on removing/replacing individual components of Django
• @idangazit’s talk on “Advanced Web Topography”; a visually very pleasing introduction to, and overview of, topography on the web
• @amjithr’s “Introduction to docker”, a quick, yet thorough introduction to docker, and his amazing one-handed typing speed ;)
• @Xof’s talk on “Really, Really Fast Django”, which gave an overview of strategies to speed up Django, through caching, caching, oh and also caching
• Finally, and this gets my vote for best talk, @evildmp’s keynote on “The programmer’s body”, a beautiful and philosophical talk on diversity in our industry.

For detailed descriptions of all talks, I highly recommend @reinoutvanrees awesome talk-by-talk summaries.

Overall, I learned a lot of things from the talks and took home a long list of libraries to review and adopt. For example:

• hospital
• structlog
• riemann
• oscar
• play it again Sam
• pytest
• and many, many more

The sprints were great fun. I got my first commit into Django and really enjoyed the ‘getting things done’ atmosphere that was palpable throughout the two days of sprinting. It was infectious.

Even if Django wasn’t a viable choice of framework (which it certainly is), its community alone would be worth sticking with it. Far from being limited to Europeans, #djangoisland drew participants from all over the world. The fact, that all participants were quartered in the same hotel, had the beautiful effect of having everyone eating together three times a day. This made meeting and interacting much more natural and prevented the kind of clustering that frequently occurs otherwise. Equally, the wide variety of the participants’ backgrounds made for very diverse and interesting conversations that frequently lasted (way too) late into the night. The wonderful food certainly helped too. On the topic of catering, I think most participants would agree that the food was excellent.

I am looking forward to next year in Cardiff!