The story of Django

When you look at the Pyramids of Egypt, you would think that such a simple and minimal design must have been quite obvious. In truth, they are the products of 4,000 years of architectural evolution. Step Pyramids, the initial (and clunky) design, had six rectangular blocks of decreasing size. It took several iterations of architectural and engineering improvements until the modern, glazing, and long-lasting limestone structures were invented.

Looking at Django, you might get a similar feeling — so elegantly built, it must have been flawlessly conceived. On the contrary, it was the result of rewrites and rapid iterations in one of the most high-pressure environments imaginable — a newsroom!

In the fall of 2003, two programmers, Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, working at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, were working on creating several local news websites in Kansas. These sites, including LJWorld.com, Lawrence.com, and KUsports.com, like most news sites were not just content-driven portals chock-full of text, photos, and videos, but they also constantly tried to serve the needs of the local Lawrence community with applications, such as a local business directory, events calendar, and classifieds.