July 31, 2025 Announcing Our Keynotes: Zags (Benjamin Zagorsky) We're honored to announce our second keynote speaker for DjangoCon US 2025: Zags (Benjamin Zagorsky) We had the opportunity to sit down with Zags and ask him a few questions about his work, his upcoming talk, and what he's looking forward to at DjangoCon US 2025. How do you use Django? I am the CTO of Zagaran, a software consulting firm. We use Django as the backend for a majority of our projects, powering web applications for a whole variety of industries and government agencies. We've used Django to power applicant management for subsidized housing programs, document management systems, Ecommerce ordering and fulfillment, and a medical research platform, to name a few of the many things we've built. How do you see Django evolving over the next few years, and what excites you most about its future? I'm always excited when Django adds new database features because database management is one of the hardest aspects of application development. Django's ORM is the area where I believe Django is most ahead of other software frameworks. The addition of native support for complex database constraints in Django 2, the support for JSONFields across all database backends in Django 3, and the addition of db_default of Django 5 are all features that have made major impacts in the way I plan features on a Django project. I'm always excited for more things like these. Can you give us a teaser about what your talk is about? Over my career, I've seen the power of Django in a lot of different business and technology contexts. One goal of my talk is to show people ways to use Django that they might never have considered or that they ruled out as infeasible. What are you most looking forward to at DjangoCon US 2025? I've been going to DjangoCon US for a number of years running, and I'm excited both to catch up with the other conference regulars and make some new friends as well. What are your favourite topics at conferences? I like talks that take a hard look at a particular tool or library (especially a new one), and show both where it's strong and where it's lacking. There are so many tools and libraries out there (far too many for me to try personally), and good talks on these help me tell what circumstances I should try one myself. How do you view the connections made at conferences? One of the things that's so fun about conferences is anyone I meet there could become my next hire, a new customer, a project collaborator, or a lifelong friend. Can you tell us about your career journey? I've spent most of my professional life running Zagaran, growing it from a 4-person founding team to its current 32 employees. In that time, I've worked on projects for dozens of other companies and government agencies, holding roles that include: individual contributor, product manager, project manager, engineering manager, architect, and CTO (and often more than one on the same project). How did you approach your career growth? My general philosophy is that when something I'm doing is routine, I should either automate it or teach other people how to do it. That way, I can spend more of my time working on the problems that no one else at the company knows how to solve. I also believe that it's really important to have the diversity of experience that comes from working on many different projects because it lets you distinguish the parts of software that are generic from the ones that are project-specific, and drives more informed technology decisions. When did you start speaking at conferences, and what has your experience been like so far? I've been teaching classes internally at Zagaran for about a decade. In 2016, I started giving talks at the Boston Django Meetup, and have been doing talks at national conferences like DjangoCon US since 2021. This is my fifth year in a row giving a talk at DjangoCon US, and I'm thrilled to be back. What do you like to do outside of your typical workday? I'm an avid board gamer. I also like spending time with my two kids, and finding ways to combine kids toys to make new toys and games beyond the limits the toy designers intended. What advice would you offer to attendees who wish to contribute to Django or its ecosystem after the conference? Django needs more support for JavaScript frameworks. There are a whole range of things that could make this better. Model serializer functionality and auto-generation of REST APIs should be part of Django; Django REST Framework is a popular third party library that does this, but this is such a common need, it should be moved into the main framework. There is also a dearth of support for compiling JavaScript in a Django project and mounting compiled JavaScript (especially React components and Vue directives) into Django templates. Are you ok with people asking you more later? Absolutely. Be sure to follow Zags on LinkedIn! Also, if you want large-scale help on a piece of software, please reach out to his company at Zagaran We can't wait to hear Zags's keynote at DjangoCon US 2025! Stay tuned for more keynote announcements. If you haven’t purchased your ticket yet, they’re still on sale. We hope to see you in Chicago.