An Introduction of sorts

I realised this week after a short conversation on Mastodon that I haven't ever shared my personal Django journey, so hear goes!

As a recent graduate in 2012, I first encounter Django while working at Ocado Technology, tasked with building internal tools for other developers. I was shown the ropes of Django by Ben Cardy (@benbacardi) and Mike Bryant. Essentially this was about putting a frontend to some scripts which would provision users and allow them to upload their ssh keys. This progressed to automating application provisioning with some hackery using the rubypython package if I remember correctly and storing data in an LDAP database. I started using Django 1.4, explored packaging these projects into .deb files, setup an internal pypi instance and tried to created a unified UI package across multiple projects. Finally we did start to open source a few packages on Github.

2015 saw me leave Ocado to join a small charity startup using Django. Here I joined Bruno Alla (@browniebroke) building out a Django application hosted on heroku. For a long time it was just us two as developers, but this eventually grew to a team of 6. Again we published a few packages that we could split from the main codebase, although most of these have not grown in popularity. It was around this time I was becoming more aware of the mailing lists and contributing back to packages we used in the ecosystem.

I left the startup in 2019 to go freelance, setting up Software Crafts, my own limited company. At the time I still wasn't sure what my ideal client would be and agonised over this for years before realising Django was the through line of my career and my passion when it came to building software! I have had numerous clients over the last 6 years, mostly with small teams or startups, either building something fresh or continuing off from where other developers had left with little to zero handover. During this time I realised the community had started a Discord server and so I joined in July 2022 and started answering questions and helping out.

The next year in 2023 I was asked to be a moderator and also attended DjangoCon Europe for the first time, which was an absolute blast. It was in this year that I started hosting a Django Social event each month in Cambridge, so generally getting very much more involved in the community. I also started donating regularly to the DSF mid 2023. 2024 saw me start contributing in the form code when I applied and got into one of the Djangonaut Sessions.

Towards the end of 2024 I proposed the Online Community Working Group which after many rounds of comments and iteration was approved earlier this year. We are still getting the ball rolling on this, but I hope to have an announcement before the year finishes! I also had the opportunity to attend DjangoCon Europe again this year which was again was lovely to meet new friends from online and old friends from the last conference, as well as take the stage for a lighting talk on the last day. I recently was also made an admin of the Discord server! In terms of my career, 2024 saw me accept the opportunity to become co-founder of a new startup which I have been building this year. This of course is built using Django and leveraging the latest patterns (HTMX & partials etc).

I see a bright future for Django, I'm going to continue to contribute my time, energy and finance to the community, currently focusing on improving our online spaces which is key for those who cannot join the conferences or other in-person meetups (for which there are many). I also hope to get to more in-person events myself in due course!