Django committers

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’s now the leader and founder of EveryBlock, a “news feed for your block”.

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 a partner at Revolution Systems which provides support services around Django and related open source technologies. A good deal of Jacob’s work time is devoted to working on Django. Jacob previously worked at World Online, where Django was invented, where he was the lead developer of Ellington, a commercial Web publishing platform for media companies.

Jacob lives in Lawrence, Kansas, USA.

Wilson Miner

Wilson’s design-fu is what makes Django look so nice. He designed the Web site you’re looking at right now, as well as Django’s acclaimed admin interface. Wilson is the designer for EveryBlock.

Wilson lives in San Francisco, USA.

Current developers

Currently, Django is led by a team of volunteers from around the globe.

BDFLs

Adrian and Jacob are the Co-Benevolent Dictators for Life of Django. When “rough consensus and working code” fails, they’re the ones who make the tough decisions.

Core developers

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 granted the coveted commit bit, and have free rein to hack on all parts of Django.

Malcolm Tredinnick

Malcolm originally wanted to be a mathematician, somehow ended up a software developer. He’s contributed to many Open Source projects, has served on the board of the GNOME foundation, and will kick your ass at chess.

When he’s not busy being an International Man of Mystery, Malcolm lives in Sydney, Australia.

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.

Joseph Kocherhans

Joseph is currently a developer at EveryBlock, and previously worked for the Lawrence Journal-World where he built most of the backend for their Marketplace site. 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.

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.

Brian Rosner

Brian is currently the tech lead at Eldarion managing and developing Django / Pinax based Web sites. He enjoys learning more about programming languages and system architectures and contributing to open source projects. Brian is the host of the Django Dose podcasts.

Brian helped immensely in getting Django’s “newforms-admin” branch finished in time for Django 1.0; he’s now a full committer, continuing to improve on the admin and forms system.

Brian lives in Denver, Colorado, 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 is currently a developer and software engineering graduate student at UT, where his dedication to spreading the ways of Python and Django never ceases.

Gary lives in Austin, Texas, USA.

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 San Francisco, CA.

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 as the lead engineer at Gidsy.

Jannis lives in Berlin, Germany.

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.

Alex Gaynor

Alex is a software engineer working at Rdio. He found Django in 2007 and has been addicted ever since he found out you don’t need to write out your forms by hand. He has a small obsession with compilers. He’s contributed to the ORM, forms, admin, and other components of Django.

Alex lives in San Francisco, CA, USA.

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 London, UK.

Carl Meyer

Carl has been working with Django since 2007 (long enough to remember queryset-refactor, but not magic-removal), and works as a freelance developer with 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.

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 previously accepted freelance work under the Pixane imprint, but now splits his days between his startup, Skills, and beautifying all things Django and Python.

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.

Paul works in Berkeley, California as a web developer and security consultant.

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.

He works in a management consulting company in Paris, France.

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 developer at Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare. He is also a computer science student at Aalto University. In his work he uses Django for developing internal business applications and sees Django as a great match for that use case.

Anssi is interested in developing the object relational mapper (ORM) and all related features. He’s also a fan of benckmarking and he tries keep Django as fast as possible.

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 Ubuntusers site.

For the time beeing 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.

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. In addition to his current job in private progressive education, Preston contributes some developer time to local non-profits.

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

Specialists

James Bennett

James is Django’s release manager, 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 Lawrence, Kansas and previously worked at World Online; currently, he’s part of the Web development team at Mozilla.

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

Ian Kelly
Ian is responsible for Django’s support for Oracle.
Matt Boersma
Matt is also responsible for Django’s Oracle support.
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. He is also helping to improve Django’s documentation.

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 web developer in Berkeley, CA, USA.

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.

Developers Emeritus

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.