Django team

The original team

Django originally started at World Online, the Web department of the Lawrence Journal-World of Lawrence, Kansas, USA.

Adrian Holovaty

Adrian is a Web developer with a background in journalism. He’s known in journalism circles as one of the pioneers of “journalism via computer programming”, and in technical circles as “the guy who invented Django.”

He was lead developer at World Online for 2.5 years, during which time Django was developed and implemented on World Online’s sites. He was the leader and founder of EveryBlock, a “news feed for your block.” He now develops Soundslice.

Adrian lives in Chicago, USA.

Simon Willison

Simon is a well-respected Web developer from England. He had a one-year internship at World Online, during which time he and Adrian developed Django from scratch. The most enthusiastic Brit you’ll ever meet, he’s passionate about best practices in Web development and maintains a well-read web-development blog.

Simon lives in Brighton, England.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Jacob is Director of Platform Security at Heroku. He worked at World Online for four years, where he helped open source Django and found the Django Software Foundation. Jacob lives on a hobby farm outside of Lawrence where he spends his weekends playing with dirt and power tools.
Wilson Miner

Wilson’s design-fu is what makes Django look so nice. He created the design that was used for nearly the first ten years on the Django Project website, as well as the current design for Django’s acclaimed admin interface. Wilson was the designer for EveryBlock and Rdio. He now designs for Facebook.

Wilson lives in San Francisco, USA.

The current team

These are the folks who have a long history of contributions, a solid track record of being helpful on the mailing lists, and a proven desire to dedicate serious time to Django. In return, they’ve been invited to join the core team.

Luke Plant

At University Luke studied physics and Materials Science and also met Michael Meeks who introduced him to Linux and Open Source, re-igniting an interest in programming. Since then he has contributed to a number of Open Source projects and worked professionally as a developer.

Luke has contributed many excellent improvements to Django, including database-level improvements, the CSRF middleware and many unit tests.

Luke currently works for a church in Bradford, UK, and part-time as a freelance developer.

Russell Keith-Magee

Russell studied physics as an undergraduate, and studied neural networks for his PhD. His first job was with a startup in the defense industry developing simulation frameworks. Over time, mostly through work with Django, he’s become more involved in Web development.

Russell has helped with several major aspects of Django, including a couple major internal refactorings, creation of the test system, and more.

Russell lives in the most isolated capital city in the world — Perth, Australia.

James Bennett

James has been one of Django’s release managers, and also contributes to the documentation and provide the occasional bugfix.

James came to Web development from philosophy when he discovered that programmers get to argue just as much while collecting much better pay. He lives in San Mateo, California and previously worked at World Online and Mozilla; currently, he’s part of the Web engineering team at Clover.

He keeps a blog, and enjoys fine port and talking to his car.

Justin Bronn

Justin Bronn is a computer scientist and attorney specializing in legal topics related to intellectual property and spatial law.

In 2007, Justin began developing django.contrib.gis in a branch, a.k.a. GeoDjango, which was merged in time for Django 1.0. While implementing GeoDjango, Justin obtained a deep knowledge of Django’s internals including the ORM, the admin, and Oracle support.

Justin lives in Houston, TX.

Karen Tracey

Karen has a background in distributed operating systems (graduate school), communications software (industry) and crossword puzzle construction (freelance). The last of these brought her to Django, in late 2006, when she set out to put a Web front-end on her crossword puzzle database. That done, she stuck around in the community answering questions, debugging problems, etc. – because coding puzzles are as much fun as word puzzles.

Karen lives in Apex, NC, USA.

Jannis Leidel

Jannis graduated in media design from Bauhaus-University Weimar, is the author of a number of pluggable Django apps and likes to contribute to Open Source projects like virtualenv and pip.

He has worked on Django’s auth, admin and staticfiles apps as well as the form, core, internationalization and test systems. He currently works at Mozilla.

Jannis lives in Berlin, Germany.

Andrew Godwin

Andrew is a freelance Python developer and tinkerer, and has been developing against Django since 2007. He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Computer Science, and has become most well known in the Django community for his work on South, the schema migrations library.

Andrew lives in San Francisco, CA, USA.

Carl Meyer

Carl has been a Django user since 2007 (long enough to remember queryset-refactor, but not magic-removal), and builds web apps at OddBird. He became a Django contributor by accident, because fixing bugs is more interesting than working around them.

Carl lives in Rapid City, SD, USA.

Ramiro Morales

Ramiro has been reading Django source code and submitting patches since mid-2006 after researching for a Python Web tool with matching awesomeness and being pointed to it by an old ninja.

A software developer in the electronic transactions industry, he is a living proof of the fact that anyone with enough enthusiasm can contribute to Django, learning a lot and having fun in the process.

Ramiro lives in Córdoba, Argentina.

Chris Beaven

Chris has been submitting patches and suggesting crazy ideas for Django since early 2006. An advocate for community involvement and a long-term triager, he is still often found answering questions in the #django IRC channel.

Chris lives in Napier, New Zealand (adding to the pool of Oceanic core developers). He works remotely as a developer for Lincoln Loop.

Honza Král

Honza first discovered Django in 2006 and started using it right away, first for school and personal projects and later in his full-time job. He contributed various patches and fixes mostly to the newforms library, newforms admin and, through participation in the Google Summer of Code project, assisted in creating the model validation functionality.

He is currently working for Whiskey Media in San Francisco developing awesome sites running on pure Django.

Tim Graham

When exploring Web frameworks for an independent study project in the fall of 2008, Tim discovered Django and was lured to it by the documentation. He enjoys contributing to the docs because they’re awesome.

Tim works as a software engineer and lives in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Paul McMillan
Paul found Django in 2008 while looking for a more structured approach to web programming. He stuck around after figuring out that the developers of Django had already invented many of the wheels he needed. His passion for breaking (and then fixing) things led to his current role working to maintain and improve the security of Django.
Julien Phalip
Julien has a background in software engineering and human-computer interaction. As a Web developer, he enjoys tinkering with the backend as much as designing and coding user interfaces. Julien discovered Django in 2007 while doing his PhD in Computing Sciences. Since then he has contributed patches to various components of the framework, in particular the admin. Julien was a co-founder of the Interaction Consortium. He now works at Odopod, a digital agency based in San Francisco, CA, USA.
Aymeric Augustin

Aymeric is an engineer with a background in mathematics and computer science. He chose Django because he believes that software should be simple, explicit and tested. His perfectionist tendencies quickly led him to triage tickets and contribute patches.

Aymeric has a pragmatic approach to software engineering, can’t live without a continuous integration server, and likes proving that Django is a good choice for enterprise software.

Claude Paroz

Claude is a former teacher who fell in love with free software at the beginning of the 21st century. He’s now working as freelancer in Web development in his native Switzerland. He has found in Django a perfect match for his needs of a stable, clean, documented and well-maintained Web framework.

He’s also helping the GNOME Translation Project as maintainer of the Django-based l10n.gnome.org.

Anssi Kääriäinen

Anssi works as a Senior Backend Developer at Holvi, a Finnish financial technology company building digital banking solutions for freelancers and small businesses. What makes Holvi an exciting challenge for Anssi is using technology to create something real people care for and actually want to use. In his daily work, he’s building a full stack bank with Django.

Anssi works mostly on ORM related issues and enjoys making the ORM solve complex query problems.

Florian Apolloner

Florian is currently studying Physics at the Graz University of Technology. Soon after he started using Django he joined the Ubuntuusers webteam to work on Inyoka, the software powering the whole Ubuntuusers site.

For the time being he lives in Graz, Austria (not Australia ;)).

Jeremy Dunck

Jeremy was rescued from corporate IT drudgery by Free Software and, in part, Django. Many of Jeremy’s interests center around access to information.

Jeremy was the lead developer of Pegasus News, one of the first uses of Django outside World Online, and has since joined Votizen, a startup intent on reducing the influence of money in politics.

He serves as DSF Secretary, organizes and helps organize sprints, cares about the health and equity of the Django community. He has gone an embarrassingly long time without a working blog.

Jeremy lives in Mountain View, CA, USA.

Bryan Veloso

Bryan found Django 0.96 through a fellow designer who was evangelizing its use. It was his first foray outside of the land that was PHP-based templating. Although he has only ever used Django for personal projects, it is the very reason he considers himself a designer/developer hybrid and is working to further design within the Django community.

Bryan works as a designer at GitHub by day, and masquerades as a vlogger and shoutcaster in the after-hours. Bryan lives in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Simon Charette

Simon is a mathematics student who discovered Django while searching for a replacement framework to an in-house PHP entity. Since that faithful day Django has been a big part of his life. So far, he’s been involved in some ORM and forms API fixes.

Apart from contributing to multiple open source projects he spends most of his spare-time playing Ultimate Frisbee and working part-time at this awesome place called Reptiletech.

Simon lives in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Donald Stufft

Donald found Python and Django in 2007 while trying to find a language, and web framework that he really enjoyed using after many years of PHP. He fell in love with the beauty of Python and the way Django made tasks simple and easy. His contributions to Django focus primarily on ensuring that it is and remains a secure web framework.

Donald currently works at Nebula Inc as a Software Engineer for their security team and lives in the Greater Philadelphia Area.

Marc Tamlyn

Marc started life on the web using Django 1.2 back in 2010, and has never looked back. He was involved with rewriting the class-based view documentation at DjangoCon EU 2012, and also helped to develop CCBV, an additional class-based view reference tool.

Marc is currently a full-time parent, part-time developer, and lives in Oxford, UK.

Shai Berger

Shai started working with Python back in 1998, and with Django just before 1.0. He is a Free Software enthusiast, but life happens, and he was driven by consulting gigs to contribute to the Oracle and SQL Server backends of South, and then the Oracle backend of Django itself. Finally, he joined core to help maintain the Oracle backend.

Shai works for Platonix, a small consulting company he started with a few friends in 1996, and lives near Tel Aviv, Israel.

Baptiste Mispelon

Baptiste discovered Django around the 1.2 version and promptly switched away from his homegrown PHP framework. He started getting more involved in the project after attending DjangoCon EU 2012, mostly by triaging tickets and submitting small patches.

Baptiste currently lives in Budapest, Hungary and works for M2BPO, a small French company providing services to architects.

Daniele Procida

Daniele unexpectedly became a Django developer on 29th April 2009. Since then he has relied daily on Django’s documentation, which has been a constant companion to him. More recently he has been able to contribute back to the project by helping improve the documentation itself.

He is the author of Arkestra and Don’t be afraid to commit. He lives in Cardiff, Wales, and works for Divio.

Erik Romijn

Erik started using Django in the days of 1.2. His largest contribution to Django was GenericIPAddressField, and he has worked on all sorts of patches since. While developing with Django, he always keeps a little list of even the slightest Django frustrations, to tackle them at a later time and prevent other developers from having to deal with the same issues.

Erik is an independent app maker, mostly developing web and mobile apps, as Solid Links. He also enjoys helping ordinary developers to build safer web apps, for which Django is already a great start, and developed Erik’s Pony Checkup with that goal in mind. Erik lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Loïc Bistuer

Loïc studied telecommunications engineering and works as an independent software developer and consultant.

He discovered Django in 2008 shortly before the 1.0 release and has been hooked ever since. He contributes mostly to Django’s ORM and Form components. His main contributions include advanced query prefetching, streamlining QuerySet and Manager to improve query reusability, and a significant refactor of forms error handling.

Loïc is originally from the South of France and currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand.

Michael Manfre

Michael started running Django on Windows against a Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) database in 2008. He quickly became the maintainer of the django-mssql database backend. Much of his involvement with Django relates to the ORM, the private 3rd party database API, and using Django on Windows.

Michael lives in Cary, NC, USA.

Collin Anderson

Collin found Django in November 2006. He was in awe of the admin and ORM and was amazed that the documentation was teaching him best web practices like redirecting after a successful POST request. Why had he never learned this before? No one knows to this day.

He enjoys helping people on the django-users mailing list and making Django simple and easy for newcomers.

Collin lives in South Bend, IN, USA where he uses Django to increase unity.

Tom Christie

Tom has background in speech recognition, networking, and web development. He has a particular interest in Web API design and is the original author of Django REST framework.

Tom lives in the seaside city of Brighton, UK.

Curtis Maloney

Curtis is a self-taught programmer from Melbourne, Australia, who eschews specialization. Upon finding Django when it was first open sourced, he realized it was possible to enjoy web development.

He spends a lot of time helping people on the #django IRC channel, and has authored and released a number of smaller Django apps.

Markus Holtermann

Markus is a senior backend developer at LaterPay in Munich. He studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin. He started working with Django in 2010 when he joined the ubuntuusers.de web team to work on Inyoka. Markus made his first contribution to the Django project during DjangoCon Europe 2013 in Warsaw. He was the web team leader for the EuroPython 2014 website and started regular contributions to Django after that.

Markus lives in Berlin, Germany.

Josh Smeaton

Josh was given the opportunity to work on a new Django app around version 1.1 after working with a homegrown PHP reporting framework. The simplicity of the ORM and the power of the Admin were extremely liberating.

Still being involved with custom reporting applications, he decided to try his hand at improving the ORM support for analytics. His contributions focus on giving more power to users of the ORM.

Josh lives in Melbourne, Australia where he heads up development for a SaaS telecommunications company.

Preston Timmons
Preston is a software developer with a background in mathematics. He enjoys Django because it enables consistent, simple, and tested systems to be built that even new programmers can quickly dive into. Preston lives in Dallas, TX.
Tomek Paczkowski

Tomek started using Django in 2007 as a tool for quickly dealing with university projects. Since then, he worked with various technologies like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and Android but always returned to Python and Django.

Tomek loves the Django community. He organized multiple Django sprints, co-organized DjangoCon Europe 2013 and has mentored at many Django Girls events.

Originally from Poland, Tomek currently lives in London, where he works at Squirrel.

Ola Sitarska

Ola started working with Django in 2009, when she discovered the power of the Django admin and quickly fell in love with the beauty of Python.

She co-organized DjangoCon Europe 2013 in Warsaw and co-authored the Django Girls Tutorial, the most beginner friendly Django tutorial out there. Together with Ola Sendecka, she started Django Girls, a community and series of Django workshops for women who’ve never programmed before.

In 2015, she became a Django Software Foundation board member. Ola was also a part of the team responsible for shipping the djangoproject.com redesign.

Originally from Poland, Ola currently lives in London, where she works with friends at Potato.

Ola Sendecka

Ola started her adventure with Django when writing a university project in 2009. After that she attended her first DjangoCon Europe which defined her future life as a Django professional.

Since then she has been an active community member. Ola co-organized a number of Django sprints and conferences including: DjangoCon Europe 2013, Django Under the Hood 2015 and DjangoCon Europe 2016. Together with Ola Sitarska she founded Django Girls, co-authored the Django Girls Tutorial and is a member of the Django Girls Foundation. She is also an author of the Coding is for Girls YouTube series teaching programming and Django to beginners.

Originally from Poland, Ola currently lives in London, where she works for Potato.

Adam Johnson

Adam started working with Django in 2012 on his first non-PHP website and has never looked back. He has since been pushing for it to be more friendly with MySQL / MariaDB, and now helps organize the London Django Meetup.

Adam hails from Cheltenham, UK and currently resides in London where he works for Time Out.

Lucie Daeye

Lucie studied Geography and Korean Studies at university. She discovered Django during the very first Django Girls in 2014: she coded her first first web app for her PhD research, loved it, and decided to switch career to programming.

Since then, she’s organized two Django Girls workshops in Paris and coached at numerous events. She started working for Django Girls in September 2015 and is now their Awesomeness Ambassador.

Past team members

Georg “Hugo” Bauer
Georg created Django’s internationalization system, managed i18n contributions and made a ton of excellent tweaks, feature additions and bug fixes.
Robert Wittams
Robert was responsible for the first refactoring of Django’s admin application to allow for easier reuse and has made a ton of excellent tweaks, feature additions and bug fixes.
Alex Gaynor

Alex was involved in many parts of Django, he contributed to the ORM, forms, admin, amongst others; he is most known for his work on multiple-database support in Django.

Alex lives in Washington, DC, USA.

Simon Meers

Simon discovered Django 0.96 during his Computer Science PhD research and has been developing with it full-time ever since. His core code contributions are mostly in Django’s admin application.

Simon works as a freelance developer based in Wollongong, Australia.

Gabriel Hurley

Gabriel has been working with Django since 2008, shortly after the 1.0 release. Convinced by his business partner that Python and Django were the right direction for the company, he couldn’t have been more happy with the decision. His contributions range across many areas in Django, but years of copy-editing and an eye for detail lead him to be particularly at home while working on Django’s documentation.

Gabriel works as a developer in the SF Bay Area, CA, USA.

Malcolm Tredinnick

Malcolm originally wanted to be a mathematician and somehow ended up a software developer. He contributed to many Open Source projects, served on the board of the GNOME foundation, and was a great chess player.

Malcolm was deeply involved in many part of Django - most notably, the ORM, but many other internals bear his fingerprints. Django’s support for unicode and autoescaping in templates can both be almost entirely attributed to Malcolm.

He was an International Man of Mystery and lived in Sydney, Australia.

Malcolm passed away on March 17, 2013.

Preston Holmes

Preston is a recovering neuroscientist who originally discovered Django as part of a sweeping move to Python from a grab bag of half a dozen languages. He was drawn to Django’s balance of practical batteries included philosophy, care and thought in code design, and strong open source community. Currently working in the rent-your-infra space (aka Cloud), he is always looking for opportunities to volunteer for community oriented education projects, such as for kids and scientists (e.g. Software Carpentry).

Preston lives with his family and animal menagerie in Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

Idan Gazit

As a self-professed design geek, Idan was initially attracted to Django sometime between magic-removal and queryset-refactor. Formally trained as a software engineer, Idan straddles the worlds of design and code, jack of two trades and master of none. He is passionate about usability and finding novel ways to extract meaning from data, and is a longtime photographer.

Idan is currently hacking on all things data and visualization at Heroku.

Matt Boersma
Matt helped with Django’s Oracle support.
Ian Kelly
Ian also helped with Oracle support.
Joseph Kocherhans

Joseph was the director of lead development at EveryBlock and previously developed at the Lawrence Journal-World. He often disappears for several days into the woods, attempts to teach himself computational linguistics, and annoys his neighbors with his Charango playing.

Joseph’s first contribution to Django was a series of improvements to the authorization system leading up to support for pluggable authorization. Since then, he’s worked on the new forms system, its use in the admin, and many other smaller improvements.

Joseph lives in Chicago, USA.

Gary Wilson

Gary starting contributing patches to Django in 2006 while developing Web applications for The University of Texas (UT). Since, he has made contributions to the email and forms systems, as well as many other improvements and code cleanups throughout the code base.

Gary lives in Austin, Texas, USA.

Brian Rosner

Brian enjoys learning more about programming languages and system architectures and contributing to open source projects.

He helped immensely in getting Django’s “newforms-admin” branch finished in time for Django 1.0.

Brian lives in Denver, Colorado, USA.

James Tauber

James is the lead developer of Pinax and the CEO and founder of Eldarion. He has been doing open source software since 1993, Python since 1998 and Django since 2006. He serves on the board of the Python Software Foundation and is currently on a leave of absence from a PhD in linguistics.

James currently lives in Boston, MA, USA but originally hails from Perth, Western Australia where he attended the same high school as Russell Keith-Magee.