>DjangoCon Europe 2026 in Athens

DjangoCon Europe 2026 ran April 15—19 in Athens, Greece. Five days of talks, sprints, and hallway conversations. And then a few extra days to see what Athens has to offer.

The conference

Eleven talks stood out. I wrote a summary for each one, with a runnable Django project to experiment with the topic. The full repo is at xhepi6/djcon26.

Here’s the list:

Talk	What it covers
Static Islands in a Dynamic Sea	Typed Python classes on Django’s ORM with Mantle
Advanced Indexing in Django and PostgreSQL	Six PostgreSQL index types through Django’s ORM
Reliable Django Signals	Transactional outbox pattern with Django 6 tasks
Django Forms in the Age of HTMx	Single-field inline editing with HTMx
Scaling with Multiple Databases in Django	Primary/replica routing in 17 lines
Partitioning Very Large Tables with Django	Partitioning billion-row tables with Django 5.2
Digitising Historical Data with Django	OCR + LLM pipeline with custom model fields
Role-Based Access Control in Django	RBAC backend with role hierarchies and closure caching
Django Transaction Primitives	django-subatomic splits atomic() into explicit parts
Supply Chain Security for Python	Real PyPI attacks and a practical defense toolkit
Is It Time for a Django Admin Rewrite?	Django-Admin-Deux: ground-up admin rewrite

Each post has a link to the experiment code. Pick a talk, clone the repo, run the project.

Athens

Athens is loud, warm, and unapologetically old. You walk out of your hotel and there’s a 2,500-year-old temple on the hill. Every street has something ancient next to something modern. It doesn’t try to be clean or polished. It just is what it is.

The Acropolis

You can see it from everywhere in the city. Getting up there is a different thing. The walk up through the Propylaea is steep, hot, and worth it.

The Parthenon is under permanent restoration, but the scale still hits. The Caryatids on the Erechtheion are the kind of thing that looks better in person than in any photo.

From the top, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus looks out over the city. A Roman theater from 161 AD, still used for performances today.

The resident cats have figured out the best spots. This one claimed a rock by the ancient walls and wasn’t moving for anyone.

Monastiraki

The old Tzistarakis Mosque sits right in the middle of Monastiraki Square. Ottoman architecture surrounded by market stalls and souvenir shops. Athens layers its history like that — Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, modern, all on the same block.

Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion

About an hour south of Athens, on the tip of the Attica peninsula. The temple sits on a cliff 60 meters above the Aegean. People come for the sunset and it delivers.

The food

Greek food doesn’t overcomplicate things. Good meat, grilled right, served on a board. That’s it.

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All talk summaries and experiment code: xhepi6/djcon26