News

In Memoriam: Tim Peters, 1952-2026

Guido van Rossum shared the news that Tim Peters died on July 15. He wrote the Zen of Python (PEP 20) and gave Python Timsort, and as "Timbot" he answered countless questions and set the tone for early core development. Pythonistas are sharing their memories in the thread.

Wagtail CMS News

DRF vs Django Ninja: the Wagtail 8.1 API schema

Wagtail's new API runs on Django Ninja, not DRF, and Sage Abdullah and Thibaud Colas explain why: schema generation is first-party rather than deprecated in favor of drf-spectacular, and Pydantic schemas follow the type hints Wagtail already uses.

Djangonaut Space News

Picking Up Django #26355, Part 1: Understanding the Problem

Emanuel Jaimes explores Django ticket #26355, investigating previous implementation attempts and possible approaches to supporting PostgreSQL's array_append functionality in ArrayField.

Landing My First Commit in Django Core.

Goodluck Igbokwe shares his journey to his first Django core commit, exploring ImageField validation and the importance of understanding the code behind the documentation.

Python Software Foundation

Python 3.16.0 alpha 2 is now available

uuid4() and uuid7() now have C implementations and run 15-30x faster, re picked up nested character sets, and startup and garbage collection are quicker. Alpha 3 follows on December 15.

PyPI's redesigned project pages with clearer security signals are now live

Each PyPI project now has a Security tab that shows whether a release has full provenance, meaning every file has an attestation, or none. The redesign also adds search and filters to the release files list, and shows file counts and yanked or quarantined status in the release history.

Joshua Mcshannon Joins the PSF as Infrastructure Engineer

The PSF's new Infrastructure Engineer will spend his time cutting operational toil across python.org, PyPI, and the systems behind PyCon US. He has already started on Kubernetes cost savings.

Updates to Django

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

Last week we had 17 pull requests merged into Django by 15 different contributors - including 8 first-time contributors! Congratulations to ines besrour, himanshu0870, ShabirAhmadLinux, Patel Namraa, Dmitry, Sahil Advani, Kunal Kumar and Hossein Shams for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!

New in Django 6.2:

• An input_type of "textarea" was added to the Textarea widget. Like other widgets, when set to "hidden" it now renders the hidden HTML attribute. (PR #21857)
• django is now the preferred name for Django's command-line interface. django-admin remains available as an alias. Both names provide the same functionality. (PR #21260)

New in Django 6.1:

• Fixed a bug in Django 6.1 where accessing a deferred field with the FETCH_PEERS fetch mode overwrote values that peer instances had already modified locally or loaded via refresh_from_db with an explicit fields argument. The fix also addresses a KeyError when a peer's row had been deleted (#37436).

Django Fellow Reports

Django Fellow Report - Jacob

Between release blocker and security work, Jacob ran a small Trac sprint over Sarah's triage workflow changes and this year's Google Summer of Code dark mode project, and followed up with the GDAL maintainers on findings from the security releases. The main management command is now named django.

Django Fellow Report - Sarah

A four-day week spent mostly on triage and the "Ready for Checkin" backlog, accepting tickets on StepValueValidator crashing for large numbers, order_by("pk") on a union of composite-pk models, and NegatedExpression mishandling FullResultSet. She also enforced ticket assignment limits and triage restrictions in Trac.

Sponsored

Prod-like data for your coding agents

Coding agents write Django code against fixtures and guess what your data looks like. Baseshift gives every agent, PR and developer its own masked copy of your production database, ready in seconds, with no infrastructure changes. Start free and point DATABASE_URL at your first clone.

Articles

Django's Generic Views: FormView

Ben Cardy's fourth class-based view post walks through FormView, which renders a form, validates it, and redirects on success.

Making Django admin easier to use every day

Some examples of a team customizing the admin as needed for their specific use cases. A worthwhile effort if you use it heavily.

Django: introducing django-launch-editor for jump-to-file debugging

Adam Johnson's new package makes the file paths on Django's debug page clickable, opening your editor right at that line. When the editor is out of reach, in Docker or on a server, clicking copies the location instead.

Authenticating Django Channels WebSockets without putting the JWT in the URL

A browser cannot send an Authorization header on a WebSocket handshake. The common fix puts the token in the query string, where every access log keeps a copy. This is the other way, and the four places it can quietly go wrong.

Using OpenTofu to manage your Infrastructure as Code

Ryan Cheley finally learned the OpenTofu that Django Commons runs on by importing his own AWS, Coolify, DigitalOcean, GitHub, Hetzner, and Tailscale setup.

Lock your GitHub Actions

Action tags can be moved, so a workflow pinned to a safe-looking tag can start running an attacker's code. Hugo van Kemenade walks through GitHub's new workflow lockfiles.

Catch the import. Name the culprit. Keep threads free: Introducing gilguard

gilguard is a tiny, zero-dependency package for free-threaded Python (3.13t, 3.14t, 3.15t). Import it first. If any later import quietly turns the GIL back on, you get an error naming the extension module, the package that shipped it, and the line of your code that pulled it in.

What makes uv slow?

uv maintainer Konstin walks through where uv still spends its time, from source distribution builds and network requests down to TOML parsing (about 30ms just to read Airflow's lockfile), hashing, NTFS, and memory allocation.

Events

Wagtail Space 2026

Wagtail Space is next week, November 18-20. The event is 100% online and you can watch live or watch the recordings at your convenience. Expect talks from Wagtail and Django experts plus guest speakers on AI, sustainable tech, and other trends shaping the web. Tickets are free, so grab one before Wednesday.

Videos

People First, Code Always - Kenneth Love

Longtime Django developer Kenneth is the guest in this episode from Jon Gould at Foxley Talent. Lots of insights from coding in the pre/post AI world.

Databases, Django APIs, and AI - Haki Benita

The video cut of Django Chat #209, just over an hour with Haki Benita on getting more out of the ORM and PostgreSQL indexes, where Django Ninja fits, and what Django still needs for typing and APIs. That last part is the ground DEP 0017 covers, adding content type parsing and a request.data attribute that handles JSON, and the forum thread has the wider debate.

Django Job Board

The PSF's CPython Developer in Residence opening is still accepting applications, alongside senior Python roles at Manychat in Barcelona and Proxify, plus a founding engineering role at Alloy.

CPython Developer in Residence at Python Software Foundation

Senior Python Engineer (Barcelona-based / Relocation support to Barcelona) at Manychat

Senior Backend Developer (Python) at Proxify AB

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Alloy

Projects

prafulgulani/django-experimental

A playground for trying experimental Django features behind feature flags, installed as django.experimental.

swarfte/django-ninja-expose

Add @expose() to a Django model. Get a REST API.

Sponsor Django News

Reach 4,300+ Django developers every Friday. See sponsorship details and rates.

Planning something for the holidays? Reply and ask about our Black Friday deal.