Happy 20th Birthday, Django

In a very real sense, I have Django to thank for my entire career. As an undergraduate, my first academic job in a research lab had me building websites to promote the research in a lab. Django was brand new, and I was uninterested in petty concerns like stability and security, so I did everything in Django.

Years later (2009), I got to do interesting work in a cutting edge machine learning lab due to the expertise I developed in Django -- I was accepted into the lab specifically to clean up the mess phd students had made trying to build a complex front end using Django's ORM with physically separate per-user MySQL database servers.

All the things that came after -- being the first full time employee at a machine learning spinout from the lab, getting acquired by a big company and scaling up sensor-driven ML in the real world, quitting to co-found an ML-centered VC fund, starting a (now 10 year old) AI company -- none of it would have happened without Django.

Does/did Django have a reputation for instability or insecurity?

Also, how on Earth did the ML PhDs decide physically segregated databases for each user were a requirement?

It's not that Django has/had any reputation for those things -- it's that Django had no reputation at all since it was a nascent project with no track record. That means it had no proof points for being stable or secure. At the time I adopted it (~Nov 2005), the public release of the Django project was only a few months old, and indeed breaking changes followed soon after (the so-called "magic removal branch"). As I recall, there were also various template escaping security issues at that time.

> Also, how on Earth did the ML PhDs decide physically segregated databases for each user were a requirement?

I worked at several labs at top academic institutions, on everything from supercomputer MPI work for multi-agent sims to image pipelines for large weather simulations, and one thing I learned is that being a good coder is orthogonal to being a good researcher. In that particular case, the person who wrote the code made the assumption that the "customers" would not allow their sensor data to be stored alongside the data from other customers, and separate databases with separate passwords was the solution they came up with. Somehow they did not notice that the terrible ergonomics of this solution meant there was probably a better way. Once I ripped out MySQL in favor of Postgres (since it had proper security) and removed the cumbersome middleware layer performance improved by over 100x.

how does one get to be a coder in a research project