News

The Call for Proposals for DjangoCon US 2026 has been extended one week!

DjangoCon US 2026 has extended its Call for Proposals deadline by one week to March 23 at 11 AM CDT, giving prospective speakers a little more time to submit their talk ideas.

CPython: 36 Years of Source Code

An analysis of the growth of CPython's codebase from its first commits to the present day

Releases

Python 3.15.0 alpha 7

Python 3.15.0 alpha 7 introduces explicit lazy imports, a new frozendict type, improved profiling tools, and JIT upgrades that deliver modest performance gains while development continues toward the upcoming beta.

Django Software Foundation

DSF member of the month - Theresa Seyram Agbenyegah

Theresa Seyram Agbenyegah features as DSF member of the month for March 2026, highlighting her Django community leadership and PyCon organization work.

Updates to Django

Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Johanan from Djangonaut Space! 🚀

Last week we had 21 pull requests merged into Django by 11 different contributors - including 2 first-time contributors! Congratulations to KhadyotTakale and Lakshya Prasad for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!

This week's Django highlights:

• Fixed TypeError in deprecation warnings if Django is imported by namespace. (#36961)

• Improved admin changelist layout for object-tools button. (#36887)

• Fixed migrate --run-syncdb crash for existing model with truncated db_table names. (#12529)

Django Fellow Reports

Fellow Report - Jacob

Two cool features landed this week: @Antoliny0919’s more standard vertical layout for inputs and labels in admin forms, and Artyom Kotovskiy’s work to make RenameModel migration operations update permission names as well.

Lots of tickets triaged, reviewed, and authored!

Fellow Report - Natalia

This week had as the main attraction the security releases I issued on Tuesday (6.0.3, 5.2.12, and 4.2.29), which required the usual coordination, strong focus, and intense follow-up.

Beyond that, a significant part of the week was spent navigating the continuing wave of LLM-generated pull requests, which adds a fair amount of noise to the review queue. After prioritizing the security work, I tried to reclaim some joy in the day-to-day Fellow work by digging through long-snoozed notification emails and picking off a number of lingering tickets and PRs that had been waiting for attention.

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Articles

New Feature Proposal for Django - AddConstraintConcurrently

More context on a recent proposal suggesting a pair of opt-in contrib.postgres operations — AddConstraintConcurrently and RemoveConstraintConcurrently — to allow unique indexes created via UniqueConstraint to be created and dropped concurrently.

Avoiding empty strings in non-nullable Django string-based model fields

Django silently converts None values in non-nullable string fields into empty strings, but a simple CheckConstraint can enforce truly required values and prevent empty data from slipping into your database.

Buttondown - How we check every link in your email

The machinery behind Buttondown's link checker is more involved than you might expect.

The State of OpenSSL for pyca/cryptography with Alex Gaynor and Paul Kehrer

The written transcript of an interview all about Python security/cryptography, current features in cryptography, as well as some of what’s coming in the future.

Year of the Snake Recap

Mariatta's review of the year showcases how prolific she was, with conferences, documentaries, ice cream selfies, and much more.

What is `self`?

Eric Matthes tackles the age-old questions that is asked many times by newcomers, but is always worth revisiting.

I Ditched Elasticsearch for Meilisearch. Here's What Nobody Tells You.

A practical deep dive into replacing Elasticsearch with Meilisearch, showing how a simpler Rust-based search engine cut costs from $120 to $14 a month while delivering faster, typo-tolerant search for typical application workloads.

Videos

From Kenya to London - Velda Kiara

The video version of Django Chat and this week's guest, Velda. We won't always do a double-feature of episodes, but Velda is always sunny and uplifting even amidst these last legs of winter.

Python Unplugged on PyTV – Free Online Python Conference

If you missed it live last week, there was a digital conference hosted by PyCharm featuring several Django speakers including Sarah Boyce (Fellow), Carlton Gibson (podcast host), and Sheena O'Connell (PSF Member). Timestamps in the description!

Podcasts

Django Chat #197: From Kenya to London with Django - Velda Kiara

Velda is a software engineer at RevSys based in London and an extremely active member of the Python and Django communities. She is a PSF Fellow, former Djangonaut, co-maintainer of django-debug-toolbar, regular conference speaker, and Microsoft MVP.

Django Job Board

Explore new opportunities this week including a Solutions Architect role at JetBrains, an Infrastructure Engineer position at the Python Software Foundation, and a Lead Backend Engineer opening at TurnTable.

Solutions Architect - Python (Client-facing) at JetBrains 🆕

Infrastructure Engineer at Python Software Foundation

Lead Backend Engineer at TurnTable

Projects

Lupus/django-lumen

Visualize your Django models as an interactive ERD diagram in the browser. No external diagram library — the diagram is pure vanilla JS + SVG rendered at request time from the live Django model registry.

paradedb/django-paradedb

Official extension to Django for use with ParadeDB.