I also started my career with Django using 0.96 in college and 1.1/1.2 with my first industry jobs. It was a really empowering framework and it is surprising to me that I still pick it up today for new projects when appropriate. I started attending the Seattle Django Users Group and discovered there were a decent number of "ex-pats" from the Lawrence Journal-World who were there as it was being developed.
Before I knew it I was helping organize the user group including our weekly coffee shop meetups in addition to the monthly lecture gatherings. There were a lot of local startups (including some very well known businesses and non-profits today) very actively collaborating on these tools. Django was really evolving the way a lot of companies used software and automation.
It wasn't only the engineering, the community ethos of Django both at the local and international scale (and the Python community as a whole) really made it possible to branch out and accelerate my personal software engineering journey.