Engineer
Lacey Henschel
Lacey Henschel joined REVSYS in 2017. Prior to joining REVSYS, she received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English from Auburn University and Texas A&M University, respectively, before joining the University of Texas at Austin as a developer in 2011.
Lacey stays very involved in the Django community. She has held leadership roles on the DjangoCon US organizing team since 2015, and in 2017 served as Conference Chair. She has also served on the Django Software Foundation Code of Conduct Committee, organized several Django Girls workshops, and is a former member of the Django Girls Support Team.
You can find Lacey on Treehouse, where she has taught courses on Django templates and the Django admin. Lacey makes regular appearances on the conference stage and has spoken at DjangoCon US, DjangoCon Europe, PostgresOpen, Open Source Bridge, PyDX, ACT-W Portland, and Django Birthday. She has also been published in Model View Culture and OpenSource.com, and is based just outside of Portland, Oregon.
Other places to find Lacey:
Lacey's Recent Posts
Better Django management commands with django-click and django-typer
Writing Django management commands can involve a ton of boilerplate code. But Revsys uses two libraries that cut our management command code in half while making it more readable and powerful: django-click and django-typer.
How to Add Blazing Fast Search to Your Django Site with Meilisearch
Step-by-step guide to integrating Meilisearch with Django, complete with automatic indexing, typo tolerance, and relevant filtering capabilities.
A Tip About DRF Permissions
I needed to structure permissions in an API view that had multiple user roles, and I learned about using the & (and), | (or) and ~ (not) operators with Django REST Framework permissions.
Lacey's Latest Talks
What You Should Know About Django REST Framework
Given at PyCascades 2021 on February 20, 2021
When I started writing Django REST Framework code in 2017, there was a lot I didn't know, like how class-based views worked and what a serializer was. After 3+ years of using DRF, I want to share the things I've learned that make writing DRF code easier and faster for me. You will learn how to save…
An Intro to Docker for Djangonauts
Given at DjangoCon US 2018 on October 15, 2018
In this talk, you will step through the parts of a Dockerfile and learn what they do. Then, Lacey will introduce you to Docker Compose and explain why using it to run multiple containers is helpful. Finally, you will learn to run commands and execute scripts from the command line using Docker, how …
What if Jane Austen had been an engineer?
Given at PyGotham 2018 on October 6, 2018
As a developer with two English degrees, over the years Lacey has identified some concrete ways this education makes me a better developer. This talk will discuss how we can take lessons from literature to write more readable code, make better tests, and create more usable websites. At the end of t…
Lacey on the Web
Some very kind words from the folks at Django Commons on Lacey's public and private contributions to that project over the last few years.
July 10, 2026
Jay Miller sat down with our own Lacey Henschel at DjangoCon US to ask her about her perspectives on the conference
September 30, 2024
Check out Lacey's Test & Code podcast interview, where she and Brian Okken chat about how unit tests can help you learn, what it's like to organize DjangoCon US, and why the Django Girls tutorial is still one of the best resources to get started with Django.
February 29, 2020