I attended DjangoCon Africa, the first DjangoCon Africa which was held in Zanzibar, Tanzania from the 6th to the 11th of November 2023. The conference was held at the State University of Zanzibar and attended by people from 22 countries. The conference had a single track for talks over three days and two days of workshops and tutorials.
Getting there
There are no direct flights from my hometown Bulawayo to Zanzibar, so I took a six-hour bus from Bulawayo to Harare to catch a flight from there. I arrived in Harare a day before my flight and spent the night at the Small World Lodge in Avondale. Small world lodge is in a neat backpackers lodge in a quiet neighbourhood, something I appreciated after beein in a bus for 6 hours. I booked a taxi the following morning to the airport using Hwindi, a Zimbabwean ride hailing service similar to Uber. The new airport terminal at the Harare airport is designed well and looks modern.
I flew with Air Tanzania from Harare to Dar es salaam where I had a connection to Zanzibar. The first leg of the journey went well with no problems but the problems started when I got to Dar es salaam. My connecting flight to Zanzibar was delayed a couple of times and I ended up spending more time at the airport than I had expected. Fortunately, I met up with a group of travellers from Uganda who were also on their way to DjangoCon Africa on the same flight. I was happy to have some people to vent with about our delayed flight.
Something I found surprising about the airport in Dar es salaam is the number of security checks they make you go through before a flight. I remember going through two or three checks before getting to Zanzibar. You pass through security on arrival, at check-in and just before getting to the boarding gates. The plane to Zanzibar eventually came, it was a Dash 8400 with a twin turboprop engine. Flight time to Zanzibar was just under twenty minutes. We arrived in Zanzibar at around 1 AM and made our separate ways to our accommodations. I stayed in Stone Town at the Zlife Stone Town, an affordable hostel in a perfect location close to the Ocean, restaurants and the night market.
The conference
The conference had roughly 300 attendees from around Africa and some attendees came from as far as the USA, and Europe. Day 1 was orientation day, sightseeing and getting to meet each other informally. It rained for most of the day so those plans were ruined. I met with a small group and we had lunch and drinks at the New Monsoon restaurant. When the rain eventually stopped, the whole conference group travelled to Pongwe Beach and, along the way we got to experience the way of life of locals. The picture below shows us taking a tour of a village.
Here, we learned about the Zanzibari marriage customs, spice preparation and other facets of everyday life. Afterwards, we had dinner at the beach in Pongwe
What I hoped to gain out of the conference.
I wanted to attend DjangoCon for several reasons. I’ve wanted to attend a Django conference for a while now but most Django conferences happen in the US or Europe; locations that were prohibitively expensive for me to travel to so my only experience of DjangoCon were videos posted online. I also wanted to attend DjangoCon Africa to connect with the broader Django community. When I switched careers to DevOps, it meant virtually no Django development and more automation and Ops. I started to forget Django and felt disconnected from the community. When the opportunity to attend a Djangocon in Zanzibar came up, you didn’t have to tell me twice. I was determined to attend.
My objective was to invigorate myself by being in the company of people passionate about Django and Python for a few days. I wanted to expand my network by meeting and talking with fellow attendees and also use the opportunity to give a talk about debugging; something every developer needs to be good at.
What I got out of the conference.
I don’t have buyer’s regrets about going to the conference—it was a great time. I got to connect with old friends and make new acquaintances. I gave my first talk at a DjangoCon, and I’m getting better at public speaking. I learned interesting things about the Django Software Foundation, Django User Groups around the world, and Open Source movements in Africa. When it comes to the talks, I especially enjoyed talks on the Cloud, Infrastructure, and testing.
Jon Atkinson‘s talk on how his company migrated out of the cloud was my favourite talk of all. In the talk, he discussed the need to shift the conversation away from cloud-serving marketing and to consider owning and operating one’s hardware as a more cost-effective option than running everything in the cloud. Building in public clouds is a good way to get started when you have no customers and lots of cash to buy infrastructure or when your loads are highly irregular or when you need to scale infrastructure up or down quickly. but they don’t have to be the default path to deploying applications. It is cheaper for most businesses to use their own infrastructure.
Honza Kral and Flavio Percoco gave a talk together entitled “From Idea to Production” that focused on deployment tools for getting Django applications online.
I gained valuable insights into the effective use of mocks in Eva Nanyonga‘s talk on testing.
Each conference day had about nine or ten scheduled talks and lightning talks at the end. On some of the days, politicians gave speeches too.
My contribution to the conference
I gave a talk on techniques and tools to debug Python code. My talk covered debugging fundamentals such as breakpoints and stack traces, tools such as PDB, and the VS Code debugger. I gave a live demo of using each tool to debug buggy code. The talk slides are available on my speakerdeck. I also compiled a list of useful debugging resources in this post.
I had a good time at DjangoCon Africa and I hope to meet all the new friends I made again.
