My DjangoCon Europe 2025 Experience

I had the pleasure of attending DjangoCon Europe 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, as a guest of MongoDB. I was there to help spread the word about the new Django MongoDB Backend—a ground-up integration that brings MongoDB to Django developers in a way that previous attempts (like Djongo) never quite managed.

At the MongoDB Booth

Together with the MongoDB team—Aniya, Rishab, and Peter—I spent time at the booth talking to developers about what the Django MongoDB Backend can do. The conversations were fantastic. Most developers were either curious or genuinely excited about the possibility of using a document database with their favorite framework.

We discussed schema flexibility, embedded documents, aggregation pipelines, and how the core Django experience—views, templates, the admin site, authentication—remains largely unchanged. A few veterans remembered previous integration attempts and its limitations, so we made sure to explain how this new integration is fundamentally different.

Talks That Stood Out

The conference reinforced something I suspected: the Django community is as vibrant as ever, and Django is being used for far more than traditional web apps. Some highlights:

• Sarah Boyce – Insights from someone on the Django core team

• Tim Bell – A deep dive into the granular structure of Django migrations

• Lucas Pires – HTMX and building JavaScript-like interactivity without leaving Django

• Ricardo Rocha – Using Celery for long-running tasks

• Haki Benita – Ostensibly about foreign keys, but really a masterclass on Django development

• Mykalin – Teaching Python and software development to adults

• William Vincent – Serving machine learning models in Django (reminded me of a demo I built with FastAPI and Scikit-learn in my first book). Be sure to check out his wonderful books on Django!

Impressions and Takeaways

I was struck by how many Django projects are essentially backends serving RESTful APIs—often with the admin site as the main interface. This makes Django REST Framework and Django Ninja support particularly relevant for the MongoDB integration.

Geospatial data and vector embeddings came up in several conversations. These are areas where MongoDB shines, and I think there's an opportunity to show Django developers what's possible beyond traditional relational patterns.

Interestingly, LLMs and AI weren't a major theme at this conference—most discussions centered on classical business problems and web applications. That said, the appetite for new approaches is clearly there.

Final Thoughts

DjangoCon Europe 2025 was a wonderful experience. The feedback on the Django MongoDB Backend was overwhelmingly positive, and I left Dublin feeling optimistic about what this integration could mean for both communities.