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Simon wasn't a cofounder. He was an early employee/intern for LJW though. Perhaps the first person other than Jacob or Adrian to work on it.


Adrian and I co-created Django while I was working at LJW in a "year in industry" program from my UK university - which got me a student visa, so you could call it an "internship" but it was paid and 11 months long.

Jacob joined shortly before I left, then Adrian and Jacob turned Django from a closed-source newspaper CMS project into open source Django. I think they deserve way more credit for the framework than I do, they made it open source and were co-BDFLs for the next decade of development.

I'll still take the co-creator credit though, because Adrian and I designed, built and sometimes even pair-programmed the core of the framework - request/response objects, view functions, template system - together during my year at the LJW.

If you're interested in more details I told a bunch of the story in this talk: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/13/django-birthday/ - and more in this Fireside Chat interview at PyCon AU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E_UqhFmJQs


Hey Simon and everyone else.

I was write to be downvoted. Apologies for getting it wrong. I started using Django in 2008, and Simon's influence was very apparent at that point - my comment was not meant to belittle his contributions (I also follow him on Mastodon - big fan of his comments on HN and there).

I guess my memory was just wrong. I knew Jacob was hired after Adrian - but I thought they both started Django after Jacob joined, and Simon was an early intern. I had the ordering totally wrong.


Wikipedia says Jacob was hired shortly before Simon's internship ended though. Not sure why you are trying to imply that Simon wasn't a co-creator.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-the-Django-web-...


In general when an intern works on something before you get there, and then you do all the real work, the intern doesn't get co-creator status.


This sounds like the Musk rule of company founding


You have silly rules.

simonw co-created Django. It's a fact. You don't have to like it.


Django was developed by Adrian and Simon, and the django site was created by Wilson Miner.


Jacob joined a little later but I think of him as a co-creator as he worked on Django substantially prior to the initial open source release, then acted as co-BDFL with Adrian for the next decade.




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