Today was the day 1 of DjangoCon US 2026 taking place in Chicago and the talks were good. The first technical talk was titled GeoDjango at City Scale and was given by Drishti Jain. There was code in her slides showing how to create fields in Django model's that are spatially aware. The talk was very informative on how to tackle spatial problems with PostgreSQL and Django.

Next speaker was Meagan Voss on Pragmatic AI. She showed with a graph that open weight models have Epoch Capabilities Indices (ECI) that are catching up to some of the closed weight models of Open AI.

I really enjoyed her slide of juxtaposing open source in 2024 without AI using an illustration of a festival from My Little Pony against open source in the era of AI using a GIF of slop from the same My Little Pony movie of 1986. The word slop is new and fresh when used to describe code. The illustration she used to exp$ well its meaning in this new context of code that comes from agentic AI.

Then came lunch. During lunch I had the opportunity to hear Tim Allen give a Lightning Talk on how to unGoogle one's life. He brought to my attention a Google practice to allow a 13 year to decide not to use its products under parental control.

He described Google entering agreements with schools to offer Chromebooks as a way to help gather data for profit. He reminds us that in 2015, Google dropped its motto "Don't be evil". His recommendations to ditch chrome, its search engine, email web services and productivity suite was strong in tone. I support such call to action to fight back against the Google encroachment to our privacy.

Next was Tobias McNulty and Gerald Carlton's talk on fuzzy name matching at scale. They gave ideas to use Daich-Mokotoff and Soundex for phonetic search; to use levenshtein distance and trigram matching for fuzzy search.

Later there was this talk from Scott Cranfill on using Django Tasks to Speak Celery with some high level use cases. Friendly people on Slack shared references to better understand the web architecture of using a message broker with workers from the python library celery to complete tasks asynchronously to do work.

I was engaged during all talks using Slack and I enjoyed the fluidity in communication with people from the community when listening to all these Django talks of people's experiences with the web framework.