DjangoconEU2025: Talk recommendations

It looks like the DjangoconEU2025 talks are starting to appear on their youtube channel. Cool!

Of course, all the talks are great and you could, should watch all of them. What follows is not a judgement on any of the talks, especially not on the talks that I'll skip. However, some of the talks are more equal than others, and play more to my taste, so here is a list of things that I found interesting:

Day 1

• Tim Bell: Turn back time: Converting integer fields to bigint using Django migrations at scale (conference page): The harrowing tale of what lengths you need to go to if you forgot to start out with BigInt fields as primary keys, and not expecting to ever have database tables with 2 billion rows.
• Adam Johnson: Data-Oriented Django Drei (conference page): More about database indexes and how to use them in smart ways.
• Sebastian Rode: The fine print in Django release notes (conference page): You can find the most interesting things by simply reading the Django release notes.
• Aivars Kalvāns: How to solve a Python mystery (conference page): ... by diving deep into tracing the Linux system. And this was billed as Audience Level: Intermediate.
• Slawa Gladkov: Logs, shells, caches and other strange words we use daily (conference page): A bit less technical but a bit more entertaining, and definitely worth watching -- even if you knew all of these terms before, of course you did!
• Lightning Talks: Always good! Watch at least the ones on “Caddy snake“ (which led to heated discussions on the bus later), and the one on “safer migrations”.

Day 2

• Mia Bajić: The Most Bizarre Software Bugs in History (conference page): very entertaining and thought-provoking.
• Wouter Steenstra: 100 Million Parking Transactions Per Year with Django (conference page): finally some real-world data on how far you can go with a Django app, and what tricks you could/should employ
• Haki Benita: How to get Foreign Keys horribly wrong in Django (conference page): Fantastic talk on the database and migrations and no, I did not know that NULL keys would be indexed!
• Jacob Walls: Dynamic models without dynamic models (conference page): just the absolute madness of this scheme makes it worth watching. If you ever do something like this in production we need to have a serious talk!
• Lightning talks: Always good! Especially the one on how to fall asleep within five minutes

Day 3

• Graham Knapp: Feature Flags: Deploy to some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time! (conference page): I've always wanted to do feature flags, and this here is one way of doing it.
• Vince Salvino: One Thousand and One Django Sites (conference page): how to host a thousand pages (and more)
• Agnès Haasser: Europe, Django and two-factor authentication (conference page): The challenges of implementing and shipping MFA tokens to your users. And also, you should use MFA tokens!
• Lightning talks: always good!