Last week we had the pleasure of attending Djangocon US. I had the opportunity to speak, and gave a talk about building the CIFFbot (slides are online if you missed it). As a long time attendee and a first time speaker, I can safely say that djangocon gets better every year. One of Django's greatest features, aside from being the framework for perfectionists with deadlines, is its community. And the yearly US conference always proves that to be true.

I wanted to write this post to thank the organizers and volunteers for putting on such a great conference. I also wanted to highlight a few trends and takeaways that we noticed this year.

Accessibility - a topic that I was personally glad to see well represented. As the web matures, its important to take into account ADA compliance. But it's not about just compliance - it's about making things easier to use. Whether your users have disabilities, or simply have a hard time reading small text with light contrast (a pet peeve of mine), accessibility is key to showing your users that you care about their experience on your site or app.

React.js - it seems to be the year of react.js. A promising javascript framework released by Facebook, react's functionality primarily centers around front end templates and layouts.

Testing - unit tests, test-driven-development (TDD), and simply better debugging practices. It was inspiring to see several talks on these topics. This only further re-iterates the focus on quality that Django and the Django developer community bring to the table.

Security - a topic that is trending across the entire IT industry. It was good to see a few talks and a half-day workshop on security and how it impacts the Django web framework. Django is well regarded as being one of the more secure web frameworks out there, due to its excellent architecture and focus on security - but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement and education. We walked away from the conference with a few new ideas on how to further harden our already highly security-focused development practices.