I was recently a guest on the Talk Python podcast to celebrate Django’s 20th Birthday. Panelists included Simon Willison, Adrian Holovaty, Jeff Triplet, and Thibaud Colas. Simon and Adrian are two of the initial creators, Thibaud is the current President of the Django Software Foundation, and Jeff has been deeply involved in the Python and Django communities for many years.

It’s also available as a livestream on YouTube if you prefer video:

I learned some things during this session as it was a chance for Simon and Adrian, in particular, to reminisce about the early days. Some standout quotes:

“We didn’t know that it was a web framework. We thought it was a tool for building local newspaper websites.”

“I ended up doing a lightning talk at that PyCon and showed what we had. It didn’t have a name yet. And, you know, people came up to me afterward and said, oh, please open source. We’re very interested in this. It looks very promising open source, even though it’s yet another Python web framework.”

“The way I would evaluate it is to look at the origin of the project. Was it extracted from something from the real world or was it built either as an academic or for fun exercise? What was the reason for its existence? And generally, I trust stuff that was extracted from real production sites more.”

To me, one of the everlasting strengths of Django has been its community. The three initial founders, Adrian and Jacob Kaplan-Moss in particular, never wanted to “own” the framework and in 2014 stepped down as Benevolent Dictators for Life (BDFLs) on the project. In their place, the community, most notably the Django Fellows program and the Django Software Foundation Board, have managed the project.

That’s way we all say, “Come for the framework, stay for the community.”