I had so much expectations for this year’s conference. Did I achieve them, No? Did I have a good time, for Sure!
https://me.chrisdevcode.com/posts/2025/djangocon-africa-2025-my-expectations/
Note:
As I write this in November, only a few months past DjangoCon Africa, my heart is heavy. It has been a difficult month for my Tanzanian brothers and sisters. To all my friends and everyone I met at the conference: I hope you are safe. Please know that I am standing with you in spirit during these politically turbulent times.
The past …
In this case, DjangoCon Africa 2023. This was the first ever DjangoCon in Africa, and for me, the first time I ever heard, read or seen those characters; D J A N G O C O N! Crazy right!
I wrote about that here … https://me.chrisdevcode.com/posts/2024/djangocon-africa-2023-a-year-later/, so many memories and because of that, I know a lot of stuff, most of them are important(LOL)
Back to the current, allow me to break this down …
Planning
I didn’t have much to stress over, Arusha is just a few hours bus drive from Nairobi, and my talk, I had written a couple of articles about it, and I was confident that I would deliver well … (overprepared …)
My workplace was in charge of organizing a hackathon a week before the conference, and I was in charge of the technical implementation. Not an easy task when organizing a hackathon 800KM away from my local environment. So I was forced to change my travel route from the simple Mombasa - Arusha, 390KM to a whopping 1380KM (Mombasa - Eldoret - Nairobi - Arusha). I was so exhausted by the time I got to Arusha!
Not to forget that I also hiked! The green environment, low temperatures (up to 12 degrees Celsius) were really crazy and awesome!
I had a few expectations, excited for some talks and speakers https://me.chrisdevcode.com/posts/2025/djangocon-africa-2025-my-expectations/ (I missed a few, courtesy of work and the messed up travel schedule!)
Arusha
I’m so used to the coastal lifestyle, slow, calm and almost everyone being polite(a common misconception hehehe). Arusha’s not a coastal town, so it was cold. I was surprised that few humans managed to pull up in shorts during the dinners …
I travelled from Arusha to Nairobi with a good friend, Monica. We arrived in Arusha at around 10.ish PM. On our way to the hotel we saw KFC(If you know me well, then you know how much I love KFC!). I was so happy.
DjangoCon Africa 2025 x UbuCon Africa 2025
The talks
All talks were amazing and worth remembering; these ones were my top picks. (I would have shared all of them, but that would be a long a** read!)
50 Shades of Green …
by Sarah
I was not happy to have missed Sarah Abderemane’s keynote, “50 shades of green - One contribution to the Django world”
Sarah was so thoughtful, she shared the link to the slides: https://keynote-50-shades-of-green.netlify.app/
Sarah tells the story of how she contributed to the Django ecosystem by leading the effort to add an accessible dark mode to the official Django website. It walks through her personal motivation as a Django learner struggling with eye strain, the discovery of an old unaddressed GitHub issue, and her decision to act despite not being an expert. The talk dives into accessibility fundamentals, especially color contrast and color blindness, shows how she audited the site, rationalized an unexpectedly large color palette, and implemented light and dark themes using CSS variables, Sass, and JavaScript toggles. It also highlights the importance of community feedback, testing, and iteration, and reflects on the broader impact of the work on accessibility, personal growth, and deeper involvement in the Django community. The core message is that meaningful open-source contributions do not require perfection or seniority, just curiosity, care, and the guts to try.
Contributing to the Django Community
by Tim
https://github.com/tim-schilling/talk-dcafrica-2025/blob/main/slides.pdf
Tim Schilling’s DjangoCon Africa 2025 talk recounts his journey from a small Wisconsin town to the global Django community, outlines his roles on the Django Steering Council and in initiatives like Django Commons and the Djangonaut Space mentorship program, and urges participation through coding, reviewing pull requests, translating documentation, creating packages, volunteering on boards or conferences, and engaging via forums and social media.
He advises aligning contributions with personal motivations and interests so that the benefits—learning, friendships and career growth—outweigh costs like time and stress, suggesting consistent and periodic involvement while self‑reflecting to choose opportunities that fit one’s goals. Open‑source engagement, he argues, exposes contributors to new ideas, builds networks, enhances mental health and fosters both technical and personal growth, making it a rewarding way to help shape the Django ecosystem while growing as developers and human beings.
Building Secure, User-Specific Dashboards with Django and Metabase
by Nancy
Nancy Amandi’s DjangoCon Africa 2025 session “Building Secure, User‑Specific Dashboards with Django and Metabase,” explains how she integrated Django’s authentication with Metabase to build an affiliate dashboard in which each logged‑in user sees only their own performance metrics, avoiding manual account setup or public data exposure.
The associated repository, django_metabase_codebase, is a non‑production demo that adds an affiliate table and referral links to Metabase’s sample dataset, requires Python 3.10+, Docker and PostgreSQL, and includes step‑by‑step instructions for cloning the repo, creating a virtual environment, installing requirements, running SQL scripts, launching a Metabase container and embedding a dashboard with locked filters while configuring environment variables such as the Metabase URL and secret keys. In the Django app, the affiliate_dashboard view checks that the requested affiliate name matches the authenticated user, signs a JWT payload and generates an iframe URL for the embedded dashboard, while the affiliates view handles user login and redirects to the appropriate dashboard. Together, the talk and codebase demonstrate a practical pattern for delivering secure, personalised dashboards at scale by combining Django and Metabase.
The future of Django
by Thibaud
The session “The future of Django,” by Thibaud Colas uses Django’s 20th birthday as a springboard for reflection and planning. He reviews the project’s history and scale—Django launched in 2005, has been run by a volunteer foundation since 2008, and today powers 500 000 to 1 million live projects with more than a million developers and over 20 000 third‑party packages.
Colas notes that this success rests on a small non‑profit: the foundation has about 400 members, 30 corporate sponsors and a US$250k annual budget. Detailing his own journey from user to contributor, board member and now president—and as a Wagtail core team member—he challenges attendees to ask what impact they want their contributions to have. Survey data and internet commentary show that while Django retains a loyal audience, interest from new developers is slowly declining and some feel the framework’s evolution lags behind competitors like FastAPI. Colas argues that the next two decades must address existential threats by embracing industry trends such as artificial intelligence (AI), enhancing developer ergonomics and expanding meta‑frameworks built on Django; he envisions a more intentional direction, better marketing, improved package discoverability and even an AI‑focused team. He calls on the community to organise locally and globally—by running events, joining working groups, coaching at Django Girls and even standing for DSF leadership—because the future of Django depends on the people in the room.
Workshops and Sprints
I attended three workshops during the conference, and they were all engaging, practical, and genuinely educational. Most importantly, every session focused on demystifying open source and showing how beginners can actually contribute, not just talk about it.
The Thursday workshops and sprints at DjangoCon Africa 2025 were designed to help newcomers make real, tangible open source contributions. In the afternoon, Monica Iyabo led a two hour workshop titled “Open Source Contribution for Beginners (Django)”. She started by explaining what open source is and why it matters, then walked us through the full contribution workflow. This included identifying beginner friendly projects and issues, forking repositories, making changes, and submitting pull requests. She also addressed the common fear of navigating large codebases. By the end of the session, every participant had made a small but real contribution to Django, which made the experience incredibly empowering.
Earlier that day, Kayongo Johnson Brian facilitated a workshop titled “Low Code Machine Learning with Django: Rapid Prototyping for IoT Applications”. He demonstrated how Django can be used to orchestrate end to end IoT machine learning pipelines. Using Django REST Framework, Celery, Django Channels, and TensorFlow Lite, he showed how to ingest sensor data, process it efficiently, and stream predictions in near real time. The session emphasized building solutions that work in bandwidth constrained African environments, including handling over 10,000 IoT events per day.
Earlier in the conference, Kudzayi Bamhare presented a session titled “The X’s and O’s of Open Source with ShotGeek”, where he shared the journey of how his personal NBA statistics side project evolved into the open source ShotGeek platform. He spoke about structuring open source projects, lowering the barrier to entry for contributors, and intentionally building contributor communities.
During the sprints that followed, Kudzayi and other mentors invited us to actively contribute to ShotGeek. I worked alongside other attendees, including Salim Nuru, Tim Schilling, Ngazetungue Muheue, and Julius Boakye, pairing with experienced maintainers to open issues and merge pull requests. Seeing my code accepted into a live open source project was genuinely exciting and motivating.
Overall, these workshops and sprints gave me hands on exposure to real open source workflows and reinforced how collaborative development can turn individual passion projects into sustainable community driven initiatives.
Photo Cards
These were some great memories, to cherish
