←back to thread

Happy 20th Birthday, Django

(www.djangoproject.com)
578 points davepeck | 2 comments | 13 Jul 25 18:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.454s | source
Show context
saikatsg ◴[14 Jul 25 13:47 UTC] No.44560215[source]▶
I know one of the co-creators (Simon W) is quite active on HN :)
replies(1): >>44560576 #
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.
replies(4): >>44560929 #>>44561212 #>>44561265 #>>44561551 #
1. 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

replies(1): >>44572920 #
2. 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.