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Happy 20th Birthday, Django

(www.djangoproject.com)
578 points davepeck | 10 comments | 13 Jul 25 18:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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saikatsg ◴[14 Jul 25 13:47 UTC] No.44560215[source]▶
I know one of the co-creators (Simon W) is quite active on HN :)
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1. BeetleB ◴[14 Jul 25 14:15 UTC] No.44560576[source]▶
Simon wasn't a cofounder. He was an early employee/intern for LJW though. Perhaps the first person other than Jacob or Adrian to work on it.
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2. indigodaddy ◴[14 Jul 25 14:49 UTC] No.44560929[source]▶
Wikipedia says Jacob was hired shortly before Simon's internship ended though. Not sure why you are trying to imply that Simon wasn't a co-creator.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-the-Django-web-...

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3. hungryhobbit ◴[14 Jul 25 14:51 UTC] No.44560951[source]▶
In general when an intern works on something before you get there, and then you do all the real work, the intern doesn't get co-creator status.
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4. simonw ◴[14 Jul 25 15:17 UTC] No.44561212[source]▶
Adrian and I co-created Django while I was working at LJW in a "year in industry" program from my UK university - which got me a student visa, so you could call it an "internship" but it was paid and 11 months long.

Jacob joined shortly before I left, then Adrian and Jacob turned Django from a closed-source newspaper CMS project into open source Django. I think they deserve way more credit for the framework than I do, they made it open source and were co-BDFLs for the next decade of development.

I'll still take the co-creator credit though, because Adrian and I designed, built and sometimes even pair-programmed the core of the framework - request/response objects, view functions, template system - together during my year at the LJW.

If you're interested in more details I told a bunch of the story in this talk: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/13/django-birthday/ - and more in this Fireside Chat interview at PyCon AU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E_UqhFmJQs

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5. pyman ◴[14 Jul 25 15:22 UTC] No.44561265[source]▶
Django was developed by Adrian and Simon, and the django site was created by Wilson Miner.
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6. simonw ◴[14 Jul 25 15:34 UTC] No.44561391[source]▶
Jacob joined a little later but I think of him as a co-creator as he worked on Django substantially prior to the initial open source release, then acted as co-BDFL with Adrian for the next decade.
7. ◴[14 Jul 25 15:47 UTC] No.44561551[source]▶
8. runjake ◴[14 Jul 25 15:47 UTC] No.44561557{3}[source]▶
You have silly rules.

simonw co-created Django. It's a fact. You don't have to like it.

9. peterashford ◴[14 Jul 25 22:35 UTC] No.44566095{3}[source]▶
This sounds like the Musk rule of company founding
10. BeetleB ◴[15 Jul 25 16:31 UTC] No.44572920[source]▶
Hey Simon and everyone else.

I was write to be downvoted. Apologies for getting it wrong. I started using Django in 2008, and Simon's influence was very apparent at that point - my comment was not meant to belittle his contributions (I also follow him on Mastodon - big fan of his comments on HN and there).

I guess my memory was just wrong. I knew Jacob was hired after Adrian - but I thought they both started Django after Jacob joined, and Simon was an early intern. I had the ordering totally wrong.