Simon Willison’s Weblog

Announcing our DjangoCon US 2024 Talks! I'm speaking at DjangoCon in Durham, NC in September.

My accepted talk title was How to design and implement extensible software with plugins. Here's my abstract:

Plugins offer a powerful way to extend software packages. Tools that support a plugin architecture include WordPress, Jupyter, VS Code and pytest - each of which benefits from an enormous array of plugins adding all kinds of new features and expanded capabilities.

Adding plugin support to an open source project can greatly reduce the friction involved in attracting new contributors. Users can work independently and even package and publish their work without needing to directly coordinate with the project's core maintainers. As a maintainer this means you can wake up one morning and your software grew new features without you even having to review a pull request!

There's one catch: information on how to design and implement plugin support for a project is scarce.

I now have three major open source projects that support plugins, with over 200 plugins published across those projects. I'll talk about everything I've learned along the way: when and how to use plugins, how to design plugin hooks and how to ensure your plugin authors have as good an experience as possible.

I'm going to be talking about what I've learned integrating Pluggy with Datasette, LLM and sqlite-utils. I've been looking for an excuse to turn this knowledge into a talk for ages, very excited to get to do it at DjangoCon!

# 17th July 2024, 3:20 am / djangocon, python, plugins, django, speaking, sqlite-utils, llm, datasette

Django #8936: Add view (read-only) permission to admin (closed). Opened 10 years ago. Closed 15 hours ago. I apparently filed this issue during the first DjangoCon back in September 2008, when Adrian and Jacob mentioned on-stage that they would like to see a read-only permission for the Django Admin. Thanks to Olivier Dalang from Fiji and Petr Dlouhý from Prague it’s going to be a feature shipping in Django 2.1. Open source is a beautiful thing.

# 17th May 2018, 1:40 pm / open-source, djangocon, django

Videos from DjangoCon 2009. The videos from September's DjangoCon are now available, including my "Cowboy development with Django" talk (also on the Internet Archive).

I talked about building Wildlife Near You on a /dev/fort trip to Alderney and the MP's expenses project at the Guardian.

# 3rd January 2010, 11:02 am / django, python, videos, conferences, djangocon, wildlifenearyou, the-guardian

Welcome to Django Dose. Launched at DjangoCon, a new Django community site designed to be a successor to TWiD, still with (shorter) podcasts but also featuring more news, articles and screencasts.

# 21st September 2009, 6:21 pm / djangocon, djangodose, django, community, twid, podcasts, screencasts

EuroDjangoCon 2009. Tickets are now on sale for the conference, scheduled for 4th-6th of May (not March as I originally said) in Prague (followed by two days of development sprints).

# 12th February 2009, 4:59 pm / django, djangocon, eurodjangocn, prague, python

EuroDjangoCon. 4th-6th of May 2009, in Prague. Talk submissions are open now, and registration starts on the 6th of February.

# 24th January 2009, 6:54 pm / eurodjangocon, django, djangocon, conferences, events, prague, python

Introducing the Django Debug Toolbar. Another project inspired by DjangoCon: a component based debugging toolbar for Django. I like the architecture so far.

# 21st September 2008, 6:32 pm / django, debugging, django-debug-toolbar, djangocon, rob-hudson

DjangoCon and learning from Zope 2. Mark Ramm presented probably the most thought-provoking talk at DjangoCon. He’s started writing it up as a series of posts.

# 17th September 2008, 11:25 pm / djangocon, mark-ramm, django, python, turbogears, zope2

YouTube: djangocon tag. Google have started posting videos of presentations at DjangoCon on YouTube.

# 16th September 2008, 2:43 am / google, youtube, django, python, djangocon

The web framework for ponies. At DjangoCon Cal Henderson suggested that Django should get a mascot with “magical powers”. Brian Veloso obliges.

# 9th September 2008, 11:59 pm / django, djangocon, calhenderson, ponies, brian-veloso

Django tickets with keyword “djangocon”. Adrian and Jacob ran an “I want a pony” session during their closing keynote at DjangoCon—I’ve filed the feature requests as tickets tagged with the “djangocon” keyword.

# 8th September 2008, 3:02 am / djangocon, djangocon08, iwantapony, django, python, adrian-holovaty, jacob-kaplan-moss, tickets

Django 1.0 release party. The big ass-party will be at the Tied House in Mountain View on Saturday the 6th from 7pm. RSVP on the linked announcement.

# 27th August 2008, 12:07 pm / bigassparty, django, djangocon, tiedhouse, party, mountainview

DjangoCon & Django 1.0 updates. DjangoCon tickets will be released in two batches of 100. The first set will be available at 12 noon UTC on Thursday July 31st; the second set will be released at 6pm UTC on Friday August 1st.

# 30th July 2008, 10:25 am / tickets, djangocon, events, django, python

DjangoCon 2008. The official DjangoCon site is up, along with a mostly complete schedule.

# 20th July 2008, 8:49 pm / djangocon, django, python