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 go 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.

I've worked in Django across most of my career at a few places for many years.

Every time I work with another framework I am reminded of how well Django has adhered to initial principles (batteries included) while adapting to changes with new technologies.

It has a great community behind it and for that to exist for so long is something remarkable. Other frameworks have advantages in some places. But for overall tooling I think it still is the best choice for anything large and complex yet not a bad choice for micro projects either.

As someone today who is an unrelenting critic of python.

I have to say thank you to Simon and the Django community as a whole.

Its a wonderful "batteries included" framework that has launched many successful projects, companies, and careers. Mine included.

And I'd be lying if I didnt say I still use pgadmin as my benchmark for evaluating admin panels in other ecosystems.

What you all created with Django is amazing.

We'd all be much further behind in tech without it.

Thanks absolute heaps.

That project (a local one to me; was created the next county over in the KC metro) put a lot of food on my table and made a lot of value for my business partners. Happy birthday!

Love Django + Django-ninja but the clunky and incomplete async support is painful.

I haven't used Django in many years, but I have fond memories of learning it and building my startup as a Django app.

Many fond memories of Google AppEngine using django on top of their datastore back in the day. 15 years later and DX is still quite similar.

This makes me happy. I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for Django.

Fastapi has completely replaced django for me. I do not miss orm at all.

Django is great! First web framework I really dove deep into, and still what I reach for first when I'm starting a new project in that space.

I know one of the co-creators (Simon W) is quite active on HN :)

Not to conflate a framework and a language, but there’s something about Django that makes me feel like I’m writing PHP. What is this effect?