Two Decades of Django: Six Feet Up at DjangoCon

DjangoCon US is where the people who build, maintain, and operate real-world Django systems gather to shape the future of the framework. This year in Chicago, Six Feet Up was there as a Platinum Sponsor, with three talks on the schedule and an arcade social that gave attendees a place to connect outside the session rooms.

We've been building with Django since its earliest releases in 2005. Twenty years in, sponsoring and speaking at DjangoCon is how we invest in the ecosystem our clients and our team depend on.

What We Presented

Our sessions this year focused on problems we see tech leaders wrestling with: deployment risk, AI adoption in practice, and the perennial challenge of communicating technical debt to the business.

The Hidden Cost of Manual Deployment

Manual deployment doesn't just slow releases. It makes delivery dependent on institutional knowledge and increases operational risk with every handoff. Calvin Hendryx-Parker, our CTO and an AWS Hero, ran a live deployment of a production-ready Django application and walked through the patterns that make releases repeatable and resilient.

• Read the blog post: The Hidden Cost of Manual Deployment
• Watch the talk: Deploy Django: GitOps and Kubernetes Made Easy

Mob Coding with AI: Lessons from a 9-Hour Sprint

AI is increasingly part of day-to-day development, but many teams are still working out where it helps and where it introduces new failure modes. Senior Python Developer Chrissy Wainwright shared results from an internal sprint using AI in a collaborative mob-coding format, including what accelerated progress and what required extra care.

• Read the blog: Mob Coding with AI: Lessons from a 9-Hour Sprint
• Watch the lightning talk (starts at 0:16): Our Experiment with Vibe Coding

Stop Asking for Time to Fix Technical Debt

When technical debt is framed as an engineering request, it loses every time to the product roadmap. Security Engineer and Senior Consultant Chris Watkins made the case for reframing debt conversations around risk, cost, and delivery constraints, using language that gives leaders a reason to act rather than defer.

• Read the blog: Stop Asking for Time to Fix Technical Debt
• Watch the lightning talk (starts at 3:34): Putting Tech Debt to Work

Why We Love Django

Django powers critical systems for organizations at every scale, and the community that sustains it runs on contribution: code, funding, and knowledge sharing.

Six Feet Up's twenty-year investment in the Django community isn't incidental to the work we do for clients. It's foundational to it. The expertise we bring to the conference is the same expertise we bring to every engagement.

Learn more about our Django expertise.