For those who are not aware. I will be giving a talk at Djangocon US 2024 as an online talk regarding my journey working on DonationStore, getting everything running on Django 5. The Talk is called Upgrading EOL Django: A Journey from 1 to 5 and it will be on Tuesday, September 24th, at 12:50PM. This is my first talk at a conference ever, and I am excited. 

 Since Elaztek Studios acquired DonationStore in 2023, I have been working on upgrading three Django applications from to Django 5. Two of those Applications were written on Django 1. 

My experience with Django before this adventure was very minimal, I had only worked with FastAPI and Flask previously. The only other exposure to it was through Mario Munoz's tutorial at Pycon US 2022. 

I was extremely nervous when I first started this journey because of the wide gap from 1 to 5 and how I have not traditionally done such an upgrade before. Usually when I have had to do it, I would just make it again from scratch, but that was not an option here. 

Without spoiling too much of the talk, I cover a lot of the different workflows that I used to handle the upgrade. Primarily using Docker Compose. Docker compose was primarily the choice vs DDev, because of my prior experience working with Docker. This became necessary because of the versions that the Applications were running under. Django 3.5 and Django 3.6 were the versions of Python that I used when I started working on DeviantCord in 2018 at Purdue Northwest. 

(Though I do not condone the recent actions of Docker increasing fee's further and then starting to abandon open source principals. Podman becomes something that I want to look into more and probably post a bit here. Or DDev).

Planning for this talk started shortly after PyTexas 2024 in the Austin airport. I had just gotten back from a work summit in Punta Cana and PyTexas 2024 had concluded. I had gone through Mason Egger's Blog post about talks, and looking at examples that Djangocon conveniently provided from last year's talks, and began writing an outline of what I expected to address in the talk. I also consulted a bit with Platform.sh Devrel, particularly on the title. Then I condensed the outline into a proposal that I submitted.

A bit before the talk was accepted, I had begun my work of getting the upgrade and began the process and nights of working on getting the development environment set up the way I wanted before working on upgrading the applications one major version at a time.

The result very much surprised me, and I feel for those who may have not handled such a major upgrade, that this will also surprise you as well. But I won't be spoiling the talk :).

For those who are interested but cannot attend, the talk will eventually be on YouTube somewhere. 

 I will post the slides after the talk is over for others to use. I will be at the conference in person, and at some point I will also be writing a post with some information that was cut. 

Looking forward to the conference and seeing you all in person!