Keynote Speakers

Every company shipping an AI product faces the same problem: if you're calling someone else's API, you're building on rented land. Your competitor can make the same API call tomorrow and ship the same feature. The companies pulling ahead design their products and models concurrently.

Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI, will share examples from Cursor, Notion and Vercel — teams that integrated fine-tuned models into production to unlock features, cut latency and push code generation past SOTA. What they all have in common is a design pattern of tight feedback loops: when a user corrects an output or finds a better solution, that data improves the model, which improves the product, which generates better data. The product and model evolve together.

Lin will break down what this loop looks like in practice — evaluation frameworks, RFT workflows, infrastructure decisions — and cover the hard tradeoffs: when to fine-tune vs. prompt engineer, how to treat cost and latency as first-class design constraints, and why handing your data to a third-party API might build your competitor's next training set.

In 2026, it can be harder than ever for someone in open source to leave their work at work at the end of the day. The future of open source, and technology as a whole, regularly makes news headlines — touching tough and potentially personal subjects such as technical ethics, intellectual property, and the value of volunteer labor.

Whether you're a new contributor looking for a project to grow with, or a salty maintainer who still remembers shipping into production Python 2.anything, you might have asked: "What am I actually building for anymore?"

As part of a global Python community, how do we stay optimistic in times like these? How do we make space for hope for ourselves and with each other? In this talk, we'll examine how we can foster building for a collective future we may never see, but can still believe in.

Joint keynote by Tim Schilling & Rachell Calhoun

Permission to board granted. Find out how we've empowered people to contribute to Django, the third-party ecosystem, and the broader community.

Djangonaut Space is a contributor mentorship program for the Django framework. It centers around a free, 8-week group mentoring session where individuals will work self-paced in a semi-structured learning environment. The program launched its pilot session at the end of 2023 with Session 6 touching down in April of 2026.

The program started with the lofty goals of making contributing to Django more sustainable, helping people level up their Django code contributions, increasing diversity among our code contributors, and setting them up for leadership roles.

After seven iterations in three years, we are seeing the long-term payoffs. We're increasing contributions, developing leaders, and we've seen how an inclusive environment that actively welcomes people in can fuel contributors on their own open-source journeys.

And yes, space puns intended.

En Español:
Mantener uno de los lenguajes de programación más usados del mundo no es solo cuestión de código. Es cargar con decisiones que afectan a millones de personas, ser parte de una comunidad que nunca duerme, y encontrar razones para seguir cuando nadie te lo pide y nadie te paga por hacerlo. El mundo del software está cambiando, y con él, las reglas del juego para quienes lo sostienen desde dentro. En esta charla compartiré lo que he aprendido después de años en las trincheras del open source: qué significa realmente ser maintainer, qué se gana, qué se pierde, y por qué a pesar de todo sigue mereciendo la pena.

In English:
Maintaining one of the most widely used programming languages in the world is not just a matter of code. It means carrying decisions that affect millions of people, being part of a community that never sleeps, and finding reasons to keep going when nobody asks you to and nobody pays you for it. The world of software is shifting, and with it, the rules of the game for those who hold it together from the inside. In this talk I will share what I have learned after years in the trenches of open source: what it really means to be a maintainer, what you gain, what you lose, and why in spite of everything it is still worth it.