Day 2 Lightning Talks

Speaker 1: Yeah, let's move on to our lockening talks. And first up is Michael and Jones and Joni Lavi from Python Ireland with Python Ireland 2025.

Speaker 2: So hey everyone, apologies for the delay. Uh I'm Bioni, this is Michaelin, and this is Jitesh. And we're uh from Python Ireland, the nonprofit aiming to popularize Python here in Ireland. And we want to talk to you about our big conference coming up in November, almost exactly half a year from now And we'll have the slides ready in Oh, we have them. Woo-hoo! Cool. So we've been hosting uh PyCon Ireland for over a decade now. And been growing uh every year until now we've been at the Radisson Blue in the city center and we've kind of stretched the limits.

Speaker 2: So we're going for a bigger-than-ever conference this year. Yeah, thank you. So we're going for two full days, a Saturday and Sunday, with two parallel tracks of talks and two parallel tracks of workshops. I mentioned we're gonna go to a bigger venue. We had close to 500 uh tickets last year with about 415 attendees on the bigger day. And now we're aiming for 450 and we can go even more. The venue will support up to 600 people. And maybe I'll give to you.

Speaker 3: So our call for speakers is about to open shortly. So we'd love to have submissions from the Django community and also the Python community at large. So definitely stay tuned and just We're gonna show you where our social media is, and when that opens up, I can't wait to read your ideas for a talk. We're also looking for people to join the organization committee. I live in Strasbourg, so you don't necessarily have to live in Ireland, but if you do, then that would be super. Super helpful, of course. I joined Python Arland earlier on in my career and it's been one of the best things that I've done. It's been super rewarding Um, you know, strongly recommend to give back, but also it helps you make connections and everything like that. And the lads are also pretty good crack most of the time, except for Jitesh, just ignore him. Just joking buddy. Um so definitely contact us at contact at python.

Speaker 3: ie. Um so our venue is gonna be at UCD. It's the O'Reilly Hall here. Um so you can see its lovely venue, quite close to where we are right now. Uh any other points about the venue or?

Speaker 2: Um yeah, no, so it's just up the road from here, a bit closer to the city center, tons of parking, a great lake just outside, and a bigger venue

Speaker 3: Yeah, so we had some complaints. Uh we were victims of our own success last year and people were like absolutely packed into the workshop rooms. So we listen to your feedback and we have hopefully resolved that issue. It's super exciting to see how much interest there was last year and be able to grow from that. Uh so if you're interested, if you're interested in sponsoring, you know somebody you might be interested in sponsoring that is open, and if you're interested in talking. or getting involved on our committee, please contact us at our contact email or you can follow us on LinkedIn here. So Any questions? November fifteenth and sixteenth, mark it down.

Speaker 4: Yeah, and we also meet every month. So uh if you are around in Ireland, uh please check out our meetup page. And uh if you are traveling to Ireland, uh you know uh you can come and join us in our meetups, uh monthly meetups. So it'll be fun to have you guys around there. Uh we we do have a lot of people who, you know, when uh they combine their uh Ireland visit and also the meetup uh timings together so that you know they could spend some time with us. We are also looking for collaborators, sponsorships, and et cetera. So yeah, you can find me here. I will be roaming around.

Speaker 3: Second Wednesday of every month is the meetup. Yeah. Second Wednesday. Awesome. All right, see you all there.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Next up is John Gold with Stop Applying for Jobs.

Speaker 5: Hi. Right, hi everyone. I'm going to talk to you about why you should stop applying for jobs. The recruits in the room's then don't do it, but anyway. Just quickly who I am, I'm John. I've been a Django recruiter since 2008. So version like 0. 1 or 9 or something. something like not not 0. 96 I think it was. Founder of Foxy Talent, we specialize in purely recruiting Python and Django engineers across UK, Europe and the United States. We donate to the DSF and uh uh corporate members there. We pretty much

Speaker 5: we're really proud of and I pretty much put this badge. on everything we do. You can get one as well if you donate. So yeah, do that. I also last year was invited to be an individual member of the DSF and organized community events like the Django Social , which hopefully a few of you made it to last night. Here we go. Right. So what I mean by stop by applying for jobs is stop just purely applying for jobs online. Sending your CV into a application and waiting for feedback. Real quick case study, I advertised the role uh last year. And I just want a quick show of hands. This is a a gen generic remote job

Speaker 5: Python Django stack. Who thinks anyone want to show out a number of like applications you reckon I received? Higher. Higher. No. Yeah, so basically we received like almost um well over 1400 applicants on for this role. It's how do you stand out amongst that? The the number itself, like you you whittle it down, and we we did a a study, like look this number exactly, we ended up putting four people forward for a job. the person who got it was somebody who actually met at DjangoCon last year. So it doesn't you know applying to jobs doesn't always work. It's about the networks and the the people that you meet. Um that number is filled with people

Speaker 5: who will have A really yeah we'll tick every box you want, a really good CV. But actually this person I did an interview with turns out to just be have a like a a uh like a deep fake AI filter over their face does not look like yeah that you every time you moved you could see the real face behind it being hidden I recorded a full story about that on YouTube, which you can sort of if you follow that, you can go see the actual what happened and poses the big question about why as well. But you're competing against that. So what should you do instead?

Speaker 5: Yeah. You've got it? Um so yeah, so it's about being more than a CV and inbox, being more than a um a a faceless application. Um but what you what you want to be is like be real life, be true, create, use the the connections you make like from being here this week. Like connect to people. and share your experience on online and doing and being everything that AI can't. That's how you get yourself noticed. Networking, networking, networking is the is the way to secure your jobs. Now, not just when you're looking, but when you're not looking is more important by building up And the trust and the relationships that will will see you through um when you do need a bit of help or you do decide to make a

Speaker 5: uh a job change. Um how to do this, post sort of regularly. I try and post every day where that's that's my sort of thing. Be yourself, try not to use Chat GPT. Definitely don't use deep fake faces. Message people if you've met somebody this week, like just give them a little message and say, hey, nice to meet you. Thanks you know thanks for the chat or I've learned this from your talk and those sort of things. Stay in touch. In the future we'll come back and help you when you're ready. Really simply Alright, if anyone's got the LinkedIn app on their phone, there's a really simple way to do it. Yeah. I've pulled it if you go to the search bar and click in that on your phone. you can then you'll see this little icon on the right hand side and that takes you to

Speaker 5: a um basically an option where you can Either have your phone, your QR code scanned and the person you're with can join, you know, add you to their network, or you can scan their code and it connects you really quickly. So you don't have to worry about spelling of names, that sort of thing And you can, yeah, just so do it, show it to the person next to you, make a connection, and yeah, it's a nice and easy way to do it, which isn't too intrusive. Yeah, but do that and help yourself or your future self by connecting and networking today. This is my contact details if you want to get in touch or Well did I I deleted the last page. Anyway, yeah, that's how you get hold of me. I was going to throw another QR code, but you don't need that.

Speaker 5: This is me. Anyway, thank you.

Speaker 1: Next up is Alisa Gerhard and Max with Django File Storage.

Speaker 6: Yeah, hi. So I should start the first slide, but maybe so yeah, so I'm Alyssa, this is mine. I was at DjangoCon last year as well, and I was talking about the authorization for accessing files in Django. And so to quickly recap that, our problem was that we needed to serve media files from our Django app through a web server. We would like to avoid complexity by using MiniOS3 or something. We simply needed to have a few media files that are relying on our disk to serve them via Nginx. And we also wanted to authorize that access so that not not like every media file would just be publicly available on the web. And our problem was that we didn't find a solution that fulfilled our requirements, which were mainly that it it would be easy to use and easy to learn for developers, especially inexperienced developers that would add a few files to a model or something.

Speaker 6: That it would integrate with our existing authorization setup. In our case, we used Django REST framework and we simply wanted to reuse those permissions that we have set anyways. And it should also be flexible for use with different web servers like Nginx or Apache or Traffic. And um so basically since we didn't find it, we had to create something ourselves and we have been using this for I think a year now and it is working. And one of the things now is that Max here wrote actually a bachelor thesis about that And so I'm just giving this over to Henry.

Speaker 7: declarative configurations and um we uh applied these concepts for for our library um we wanted to to build a Secure system that is easy, easy to set up and easy to use for developers. And so the goals for the library were to to have the initial configuration in the settings. py, but after that all configuration and all declarations should be done in the field itself, so in the in the model. And we also wanted an integration um of the major web servers like Nginx and Apache. And like uh Alyssa already said, uh the traffic server is uh something we're currently working on. So And we achieved this um

Speaker 7: by by using a lot of code reflections at the uh application startup. And basically what the system does is It it checks uh the configurations for conflicting values and then it generates the views. uh according to the configurations and um then the views will uh execute the authorization checks and do the access controls so You can either use uh the simple Django permissions or the Django Rest framework base permissions, and uh then the the system uh or the views return the uh response specifically for your uh web server So for Nginx, that will be the XXL redirect headers. And

Speaker 7: of course the system also generates uh the URL patterns for the URLs. py file. So and um to Here is a real world example. So what you see is a migration from the regular Django file field to the File storage, protected file file field, and as you can see it's just literally uh a few lines of code to be added to uh store your uh files securely. So Basically, in this setting um the access to the files would would be granted for all authenticated users. But you could easily take this one step further and and restrict uh the access further by adding uh the permissions also in the model and then file storage will take care of the access control

Speaker 7: and um yeah the the outstanding thing is that the developers Don't have to to bother on implementing the view and the response for the server. That's all stuff that the file storage will take care of. And what's the future for file storage?

Speaker 6: Yeah, so we are actually planning on open sourcing this and publishing it via GitHub as uh Django. like uh framework library. And so stay tuned. We will probably be publishing this by the end of the year. We hope that we can do that and find time for that. And so yeah Stay tuned and thank you.

Speaker 1: Next up is Michael Lochiris with building a chatbot with Langchain and Django plus PyCon Grease

Speaker 8: So hello everyone. I'm Michael Ugiris. I'm a research associate at the University of Athens. And I'm going to present you how to build, briefly present you how to build a chatbot with Langchain and Django. So, first thing first, you choose your favorite LLM and type how to build a chatbot. No, I'm kidding. Okay. So, for the purpose of this presentation, let's assume that we want to build a chatbot for a supermarket or an eShop. And we want the chatbot to get the user input and either respond with text or call some functions. our functions. So the the whole process uh involves four simple steps or not so simple. The first one is to grab the user input The second one is to route the input to the Django View, Async

Speaker 8: view, consumer if we use channels The third one is to provide this input to the agent, the long chain agent. The agent will get this input and will respond and then the respond will be sent back to the user. So, we can see from this diagram that the lang chain needs the input from the user, actually the user prompt, and then based on the user prompt It will either invoke one of our functions or using rank will send this to an LLM and the response will be sent back to the user. Just a small snippet of code. This is a function that meant to be invoked by the agent. As you can see, it's a simple Python function. It is decorated with a tool. The tool is taken from the Langchain library. And you will notice that there are a lot of

Speaker 8: dock strings that explain how these functions will be used, some examples, and this will help the agent to select this function based on user input. So here we can see a demo or some screenshots of a demo. I will post the code to my GitHub repo. You can see that the user is like me, indecisive, hungry, and wants a snack. Full of vitamins, and here the agent not only sends back the recipe all the ingredients as well. And you can see that all the ingredients are added automatically to the card. So the user just needs to check out to press the checkout button. That's all for me. One more thing. I'm very glad to invite you to the very first PyCon

Speaker 8: Greece. So please scan the QR code for more information. I will be there and I hope to see you to. So thank you.

Speaker 1: Next up is Eduardo Felipe Castanaro. How to extract free performance out of your high availability database replicas.

Speaker 7: To start off, I'm not actually Eduardo. Eduardo is my boss, but he

Speaker 6: he tried to convince me to make a presentation so Uh

Speaker 7: thanks to him, I guess. Replicas for those who don't know, I think most of you do know, um are copies of domain database that are used mainly for high availability. So if your main database explodes, you can just redirect to the replica and hopefully not lose a lot of data. Most people only make the replica set up and leave it running, but actually you you can uh technically you could be querying your replica to offload some of the Load from your main database into the replica. Uh

Speaker 7: uh, we will see if jung how easy it is to do that in Django. One of the ways you could do that is with using. If you enter the query set page, you've probably seen this method. Kinda It is very useful for making specific queries onto a different database. So that example down there, you'll be using you'll be doing a query onto the replica. Uh but as soon as you get more complex examples like this one, it can get a bit out of hand adding a lot of using. And if you're using a an external uh third-party application uh you can't actually most of them do not accept

Speaker 8: using so you can do that.

Speaker 7: Another way you could be doing that is using database routers. I'm not sure if anyone knows about that. It's got a hidden in the Django documentation. But they're mo they mostly use it to always focus, to always make a sp uh a specific model use a specific database. But with a lot of magic code with context bars

Speaker 6: and concept

Speaker 7: context managers, you can set up it in a way where I'm skipping a lot so we can go a bit faster, but you can set up in a way so only adding a context manager, it ensures all the queries below use the replica for the query. Uh but also not really because transaction atomic and connection cursor do not use those database routers and we can't be sure if the ex third-party applications are or not. using connection curves on the side, so it's not really that useful. So are there any other options? Uh kinda we can do some meta programming. Uh also no smoking patching but according to this diagram if I'm who the one who wrote it is uh dynamic metaprogramming so

Speaker 7: um The idea is that you can override it it is a bit scary, but you can override the db. connection and the transaction atomic functions from Django as long as you do it while initializing it Uh and yeah, then if you add something like that, all the queries below will be uh redirected to the replica. Of course, this this case is very simple, but if you have a more complex workload That would put stress on your main database. This is really useful. Oops, and and now this uh these things work correctly. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Next up is Johannes Spielmann with how to fall asleep within five minutes. Not in this talk, however.

Speaker 7: Okay, I thought I'd do something a little bit different today and I'm going to tell you how to fall asleep in five minutes Not during the talk, I hope. Okay, I'm a bit of a night owl. And uh after a few weeks and uh hours of hacking Django during the nights, I sometimes have trouble falling asleep. And some of you might have the same problem. So I was very happy when I found this method And it does have a bit of a story to it. So in the 1940s, the army found out something very, very interesting. War is stressful. They also found out that being stressed makes it hard to go to sleep. They probably knew that before, but they didn't care.

Speaker 7: But then they found out that being tired makes it really hard to operate complicated machines like airplanes. And that led to a lot of pilots making mistakes like this one. So they did something about it. They did a study and created a process. And they created a process that works. And the process is called the military sleeping method. And the idea is that you can sleep anywhere and everywhere and go to sleep within five minutes. Now, a bit of a disclaimer. This method is called the military sleeping method. You'll find it online. It goes viral every few years. and uh some people are very in favorite of it, some people not so much. I'm going to tell you what works for me, and tomorrow you'll be telling me what worked for you.

Speaker 7: Okay, so the whole method relies on doing two things. Making your body quiet and making your mind quiet. And there are a handful of steps to this. Step zero, be tired. Many people skip this step. You would be surprised. So if you've sat on your com on your computer all day, if you drank Coca-Cola and uh and coffee all day, you will not be tired. You will not be able to fall asleep with any method. Go outside, go for a walk, go away from the skin a little bit, get tired, then it'll work. Step one, be comfortable. Sounds obvious, but some people skip it. Sometimes you might not have the option to be comfortable.

Speaker 7: You still want to go to sleep. So find a place where you can lie down, where you can be comfortable, where you can be as safe as this cat. Probably listen to some music as well, just like the cat does. Step two, relax your mind. And that's really the first trick that you're going to learn today What you'll have to do is find an image in your mind that is peaceful without a lot of movement There are some ideas that you can do, like you could sit on a beach and relax there. You could lie in a hammock and relax there. The one thing that works for me is imagining that I'm in a boat that's on a lake and I'm looking at the sky Something where you don't move a lot, where you don't have the image of being awake, but instead you have the image of being

Speaker 7: relaxed. Step three, relax your body. And there's a process to this as well. The first thing you need to do is you need to relax your face. And the trick really is to feel the muscles in your face and then purposefully relax them. You start at the top of your body, you go down through your body and relax all the muscles. Feel your shoulders Relax. Feel your arms, relax them. Feel your thighs, relax them, feel your legs, feel your feet, relax. It's always the same. Feel them, then relax them. Step four, don't worry about it. It will not work the first time. Sometimes your mind starts spinning and you have thoughts. Let them spin for a little while, then come back to your beach or your boat or your hammock.

Speaker 7: Don't worry about it. Try it again. It'll work in the end. Step five, fall asleep. Step six, tell me tomorrow how it worked. See ya tomorrow.

Speaker 1: Next up is Shekar Korala with EuroPython 2025.

Speaker 4: Hi everyone, it's actually two of us. So I'm Mia, I'm vice chair of the EuroPython Society. The EuroPython Society is a nonprofit that organizes EuroPython conference and also we support European communities through grants. Yeah, hello everyone. So as I as Mia said, like you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, so I'm Secher. We are one of the board members of EuroPython Society. Okay. We can go. We can go. Okay, so as you can see, we just sort of introducing the EuroPython. So it's one of the oldest and the largest Python lead company uh conference in Europe. And we have been doing a lot of conference thing and this year we are going in the beautiful city of Prague, uh, Czech Republic.

Speaker 4: So mark the date, it's 14 to 20 July. And tickets are already open. It's a whole one week of fun and learning. We have tutorials, talks, we have all sorts of people like it's a very big uh event. We have people from all sorts of domain using Django, Fast API, anything you can imagine, Java, Skip or Rust and all the Speakers are already selected. You can see we have uh great keynote speakers. Some of them are like core C Python developers. created a fast API, our winning speakers there. And you can check it out all these speaker lists. You can even find some of your point of interest. any libraries or any other things you want to learn or want to contact or grow your network.

Speaker 4: These are the list for the tutorials. We have also released the schedule for the talks as well. And So again, we one more thing is we do have a newsletter as well. So you can subscribe for that It will give you much more update about the conference, also about all sorts of things we do. Our newsletter is monthly, so you can check it out. All things are going over the communities.

Speaker 8: Yeah, we don't spam. It's just once a month. And you can also follow us on social media. So if you go to our website, you can see here the links. And here is the QR code. So you can just scan it and land on our website. Um that's everything. Thank you and hope to see you in prague.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Next up is Tobias McNulti with the task with salary.

Speaker 7: Thank you for your patience. I'm so happy to be here again in uh DjangoCon Europe. I'm uh Tobias McNulty. I'm from uh The United States. Thank you for also allowing us into uh your country. Um I got uh I got a hard time at immigration because uh I have a last name McNulty and I've uh not been to Ireland before. So yes, thank you for allowing me in. I'm a co-founder at Cactus. We're a Django consultancy based in the United States. I work with Karen Tracy, who gave a talk earlier about debugging in production. I'm going to follow John's lead wherever you are

Speaker 7: and start advertising our corporate sponsorship of the DSF more prominently, which we are very proud of. And uh I have also been I think I I might be what did you say uh Carlton earlier? I don't know. We're uh yes, we've I've been around for a long time uh in the Django community and I uh serve on the volunteer on the ops team right now. So does anybody know not know what Celery is? Has anyone not heard of Celery before? Great, thank you. So uh yeah, Selry is a uh Python package that you can add to your Django project and uh You can use it for scheduling tasks in the background. You might often see it invoked with a dot delay on a salary task. And you might need it for things like

Speaker 7: generating assets after an upload or running tasks in the background such as sending an email or cleaning up old files or database records. Uh

Speaker 8: so

Speaker 7: yeah, how do you write uh good salary tasks? I think a lot of us have probably written uh, you know, taken a big chunk of code and put it in a uh you know a task in the background and run it and it might take you know minutes minutes to run. And again you'll probably see that with the dot delay in existing Django projects. But these long-running tasks can be really hard to debug. On the flip side, you know, really short ones might have a lot of messaging overhead if it's just a few hundred milliseconds that you know they've probably gone too far in the other direction. But the goal is to design around pieces of work that you can run in parallel on different workers and different potentially different machines in your deployed environment. Another thing to consider with your task size is the

Speaker 7: graceful shutdown period for your deployed environment. Kubernetes default timeout is 30 seconds and Supervisor D's is 10 seconds. You want to try to keep your task runtime well under that so that when you uh deploy, you don't terminate a task that you have in progress. So again, yeah, you'll often see the you know dot delay uh in celery. There are many other, uh not many, but there are a few other um uh uh functions that you can use in Celery. uh to uh group and chain tasks together. Uh you know, chain you can take a uh we'll run all the tasks in that in uh serially and pass the result from the previous task to the next one. Uh group will run all of those in parallel and the result of that can even be

Speaker 7: piped into a chain or another task for for example to aggregate uh the results. And there's more of those those primitives linked here. General rules, you know, the goal is just to limit the size and importance of the arguments that you pass, so like with calling a test with dot delay. You don't want to pass a bunch of state in. You want to pass in a you know a primary key or some other identifier and likewise with the result, you know, store your state in the database. Don't use the salary task to do that. So there is some simple code if you want to check it out. This is a much abbreviated version of a talk I wrote a little while ago. I updated this last night, so it does work with Django 5. 2 and Python 3. 12. And just to very quickly go through a couple options in here.

Speaker 7: This is something that you don't want to do. If you run a bunch of tasks with the group and then call dot delay

Speaker 6: on that.

Speaker 7: And then say you might want to wait for the results of that. If you call . join. That's bad, number one, because you're just holding up this process for a long time. And number two, if you run that from another task, it will actually die with the runtime error here. Quick rewrite of that. We'll again run all of these tasks in parallel with the group primitive. and then uh pipe the result of all of those uh as a list into uh this task some pages uh chord task which will uh aggregate or record the results and uh That's all I have. Thanks.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Next up is Sarah Abdirame with ways to support the Django community.

Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm the Vice President of the Jungle Software Foundation, and today I would like to talk about ways to support the community. I'm another Sarah to tell you like you can help Django, but in another way, this with them. So

Speaker 6: first is to have like your feedbacks and ideas

Speaker 3: because I'm pretty sure many of you have a lot of good ideas. And one thing is to have like a we have actually a form

Speaker 6: that you can provide all the IDs you would like to have.

Speaker 3: We had already some in the last workshop. So

Speaker 6: certified developers program, a European foundation, or even like member directory with five with profiles, or even like other ID which is not mentioned here So there is the link, you can click it. Like the QR code which was showed uh before will be redirecting to the slides and it will be at the end of the presentation so you can definitely have the slide and click on it.

Speaker 8: Other way to uh contribute is to donate to the Jungle Software Foundation this week.

Speaker 3: You can also do that after this week. And um so this way you can help us to um to get uh funds to contribute to the fellow which which are already like working on the the work um the the framework and um and

Speaker 8: help us to do all the ideas which would be helpful.

Speaker 3: And if you contribute this week, I have like nice stickers to give you, especially like the birthday stickers What you can do also is like become a member of the Django Software Foundation. You can be either an individual member So if you think you are like contributing to the Django community, you can nominate yourself or even someone else. And this way you can you are allowed to vote to the Starring Council and also the DSF board So this way you contribute to the future of Django, which is cool. And other way is to sponsor other corporate members. So in this way like

Speaker 6: your company can get more visibility uh through Django and we also have a newsletter which will help to get more visibility of your company if you are recruiting or just would like to know more about your company And uh last uh is to support our birthday celebration. As you may have noticed, this is the 20th birthday of Django. And we would like to do like a lot of things like run a birthday party and like you could do that in your local community and this way we could help us to like actually do it like with stickers and things which would help like run the a nice birthday party. You can donate $20

Speaker 6: for the 20-year Django. This is not like a big amount for some of you, so you can actually like it can be like really a quick win for you. You can also like help us by funding like the global Django live stream, which could happen in July, which is actually the birthday of Django and help us also to find like

Speaker 3: 20 people which are really amazing in the community to feature It can be even yourself. And if you know someone, please talk to me or even like put in the form. If you have any idea of someone which can be really nice to feature And that's it for me.

Speaker 1: Thank you. That's all for today. Thank you for coming. Thank you for staying. And we'll see you tomorrow again.