Django Chat From Kenya to London with Django - Velda Kiara
Mar 11, 2026
Velda Kiara, a software engineer at RevSys and active Django contributor and Microsoft MVP. She shares her move from Kenya to London and how community work led to career opportunities. She dives into Django performance myths and practical tuning techniques. She also talks about maintaining django-debug-toolbar, using AI responsibly, and running a developer newsletter.
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Moving From Kenya To London Was A Full Reset
- Velda recounted culture shock moving from Kenya to London, from daylight patterns to assembling flatpack furniture.
- She described buying thermal clothes, learning knife purchasing rules, and nearly crying assembling a bookshelf the first time.
Django Performance Is Contextual Not Inherently Slow
- Velda challenged the blanket claim that "Django is slow" and emphasized measuring needs before choosing optimizations.
- She covered practical tuning beyond select_related and caching, highlighting trade-offs like indexing costs and sharding decisions.
Treat Serializers As Your Marshalling Layer
- Treat Django serializers as the application's marshalling layer and think about their role in system design.
- Velda linked serializer choices to larger system design concerns and used them to explain marshalling between runtimes and APIs.
