I arrived at PyCon in time to catch lunch and a repeat of the history of Python talk that Guido gave at Google NYC on Wednesday. The first regular talk I went to was Adrian Holovaty's talk on Django . Steve Holden posted a nice summary of the Django talk . I'm still getting caught up on email and finishing my slides so I'll limit myself to one or two additions to Steve's post. I like the scheme for mapping URLs to Python functions that provide the implementation. There is a regex-based mapping scheme that allows you to change the implementation (call a different function) without changing the urls. Adrian observed that the mapping file is also a great catalog of the software running in the site. The key components of Django are: A URL dispatcher A database wrapper A template system An admin framework There's nothing particularly surprising about this list. I like the emphasis on modularity he described. You can use any of the components in isolation (or none