Django at PyCon FR 2025 🇫🇷
Last week, we had a great time at PyCon FR 2025 - a free (!) gathering for Pythonistas in France. Here are some of our highlights.
Sprints on Django, our website, IA, marketing
Over two days, the conference started with 27 contributors joining us to contribute to Django and our website and online presence. Half in the room were complete newcomers to open source, wanting to get a taste of what it’s like behind the scenes. We also had people who were new to Django, taking the excellent Django Girls tutorial to get up to speed with the project. The tutorial is translated in 20 languages(!), so it’s excellent in situations like this where people come from all over Europe.
Carmen, one of our sprint contributors, took the time to test that our software for ongoing Board elections is accessible 💚
Discussing Django’s direction
At the sprints, we also organized discussions on Django’s direction - specifically on marketing, Artificial Intelligence, and technical decisions. Some recurring topics were:
- Highlights from the State of Django 2025 report produced by JetBrains, and the need for fundraising partnerships like their ongoing 30% Off PyCharm Pro – 100% for Django campaign.
- What “batteries included” means for Django in 2025. Does it include REST? Contributors discussed the recent forum thread Django needs a REST story.
- Type hints and Django. The existing feature requests, and how feature requests are meant to work for Django.
- The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Django and Django developers. How AI adoption could be supported with documentation investments, but also the ethical concerns of AI coding.
We had a great time during those two days of sprints ❤️ thank you to everyone involved, we hope you stick around!
Design systems with JinjaX, Stimulus, and Cube CSS
Mads demonstrated how to bring a design-system mindset to Django projects by combining JinjaX, Stimulus JS, and Cube CSS. Supported by modern tooling like Figma, Vite, and Storybook. JinjaX in particular, allows to take a more component-driven “lego blocks” approach to front-end development with Django.
Three years of htmx in Django
Céline Martinet Sanchez shared her takeaways from using htmx with Django over three years. The verdict? A joyful developer experience, some (solved) challenges with testing.
Her recommended additions to make the most of the two frameworks:
- django-htmx: opinionated htmx integration
- Slippers: better DX for Django templates
- factory_boy: test data generator (alternative to fixtures)
- Syrupy: snapshots for pytest
Becoming an open-source contributor in 2025
In her talk, Amanda Savluchinske explored how newcomers can get involved in open source—highlighting the Django community’s Djangonaut Space program. She explains why doing it is great, how to engage with busy maintainers, and specific actions people can take to get started.
We really liked her sharing a prompt she uses with AI, to iterate on questions to maintainers before hitting “send”:
“You are an expert in technical writing. I'm trying to write a message about a question I have about this open-source project I'm contributing to. Here's the link to its repo ‹Add link here›. I want to convey my question to the maintainers in a clear, concise way, at the same time that I want it to have enough context so that the communication happens with the least back and forth possible. I want this question to contain a short, max two sentence summary upfront, and then more context in the text's body. Ask me whatever questions you need about my question and context in order to produce this message.”
La Suite numérique: government collaboration powered by Django
PyCon FR also featured La Suite numérique, the French government’s collaborative workspace—developed with partners in Germany, the Netherlands (Mijn Bureau), and Italy. Their platform includes collaborative documents, video calls, chat, and an AI assistant — all powered by Django 🤘. This work is now part of a wider European Union initiative for sovereign digital infrastructure based on open source, for more information see: Commission to launch Digital Commons EDIC to support sovereign European digital infrastructure and technology.
Up next…
Up next, we have the first ever Django Day India event! And closer to France, DjangoCon Europe 2026 will take place in Athens, Greece 🇬🇷🏖️🏛️☀️
We’re elated to support events like PyCon FR 2025. To help us do more of this, take a look at this great offer from JetBrains: 30% Off PyCharm Pro – 100% for Django – All money goes to the Django Software Foundation!
