For June 2025, we welcome Elena Williams as our DSF member of the month! ā Elena is a dedicated member of the Django community. She is part of the Code of Conduct Working Group and she is a Django Girls organizer in Australia. She has been a DSF member since July 2014. You can learn more about Elena by visiting
Elena's website and
her GitHub Profile. Letās spend some time getting to know Elena better! Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc) My background is that I was always interested in computers, though my parents were more creative types, my Dad was an Architect (of built structures). When I was a kid we had computers for CAD around the house before it was common. I was always into STEM subjects, but unfortunately in that era for girls to do engineering it was a bit too hostile for me, so I trained in finance instead and worked in that industry (finance and banking, MNE orgs) for nearly a decade. I kept coming back to coding and was always building computers, and was obsessed with the internet as a technology from pretty early on. Just after I discovered Django I did a Masters in Computing at ANU. To this day my main hobbies are programming/webdev (very much a person who codes for fun) and the open source community. My persistent other hobbies are hackspace activities, I like CNC and laser stuff, but will pick up any and all tools/mediums and give them a go, lately been spending time with blender and cabinetry. When I can, I like to get away to snowboard or kitesurf, and this wild Australian long distance endurance navigation sport called rogaining. Really at the moment Iām mostly focussed on being a parent (which is an awesome experience), my friends (mostly python related), my job and working on the community here in Australia. With my family we go camping/hiking more than most. Iāve also continued to be a sessional academic at ANU teaching software engineering for many years. How did you start using Django? Golly, Iāve been using Django forever. Iād started doing web stuff in the early ā00s and worked in a range of languages and paradigms. I was working in a physics research institute at a high profile university in Australia doing web stuff and made friends with a bunch of the doctoral students. In around 2007, one of these students, and my good mate, Dave, randomly recommended this new framework Django and Python (and emacs also actually but thatās a different story). Basically I got into it immediately and never looked back and went on to build a career around Django (actually Dave later gave up physics and did the same thing too). Iāve been engaged with the Python and Django communities to varying degrees since about 2011 as well. To be honest when I discovered the language and the framework I really didnāt expect to still be passionate about them all these years later but I really am! Hopefully I can continue to be well into the future also. What other framework do you know and if there is anything you would like to have in Django if you had magical powers? Over the years (being a curious person) Iāve worked with many many web frameworks and technologies, the vast majority of the big ones. In recent years Iāve been spending time with FastAPI and SQLAlchemy as well as non-python technologies. Django is better though. Not using Django as much at the moment makes me love it even more and realise how lucky we are with such a well designed and well supported framework. Itās not perfect but itās outstanding. Having said that: at a technical level Iād love to have ācheaperā ways (in every sense) to deploy. Even though deployment methods have changed beyond recognition several times over the years, I always thought this would get easier over time and am kind of surprised that it hasnāt. Very specific to me is that I need Django to have stronger support for many database schemas in the same project, but honestly this is just a specific problem I have inherited in a project at the moment, but itāll pass eventually. What projects are you working on now? Over the last few years Iāve helped organise a number of events, including PyConAU, though realised Iād been taking on too many projects and trying to pull back actually! Still: Internationally Iām on DSF CoC with a great team. Nationally this year Iāve been serving on the committee of our main Australian open source foundation body, Linux Australia, as well as working in a small team trying to bring together all of the Australian python user groups under a banner we hope to call Python Australia and Iāve had a keen interest in python user groups around the world. In my home town Iāve been organising our local user groups for some time with an awesome team, as well as our fantastic local PyLadies. For work Iām flat-chat working in a senior role on a Platform team in a small data company that provides ācritical digital infrastructureā for Australia. Though my most important project of all at the moment really is my family, and I do really prioritise my friends and being healthy nowadays. Iām an avid hackerspace person and do have a couple of purportedly active projects (Iām obsessed with maps among other things) but these are relatively neglected at the moment as I just donāt have the bandwidth. Which Django libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)? I just love the ORM. Weāre so spoiled in the Django community we donāt realise how mature and feature-rich the ORM is. Maybe Iām biased because Iāve been using it for so long I just āthinkā in Django ORM and Iāve been working away from it lately. Itās such a (comparative) pleasure to use. You can nit-pick at it but compared to anything else itās so beautifully thought through. The admin was the Django ākiller appā in 2008 and Iād argue still is in 2025. To be some dozens of seconds away from a custom CMS backend at any time is still magical. Pony magical. Itās still as impressive as ever to show off to people. Also in the same way that Guido says python makes a great calculator: Django makes a great quick tool for really fast data munging, canāt describe how liberating it feels using it for this purpose. Writing tests in Django is under-rated too. There are so many amazing 3rd party libraries, too many to mention. For shout-outs I donāt think I have any projects without Debug Toolbar. The 3rd party caching libraries Memcache and Redis are both great. Iām also usually happy when I turn on Celery, and excited to see DEP-0014 on its way. Danny and Audreyās Django Cookiecutter project is a great reference even if you donāt take the whole enchilada. What are the top three things in Django that you like? Iāve been lucky to generally have had a pretty great time with Django. Generally Iāve used it for projects where it was a really good fit and so it wasnāt painful. As such I like weird little quirky things about Django. Haters-can-hate but I actually really like a bunch of this controversial stuff, for example I like settings.py as a pattern for projects that arenāt out of control; I enjoy using and customising the management commands framework; I think Meta class as an approach to that type of awkward problem is neat; Iāve generally had a pretty nice time with the template language; I dig into utils and reuse them probably more often than most; ORM and the Tests obviously (itās trivial to plugin pytest of course). Everything is a trade-off in software engineering and while Iām very biased: I just like the trade-offs that Django has chosen, theyāre some of the best-in-class. The top 3 things though? This is tough. I just like it. To nail down actual answers though: the framework workflow overall; that the project has stayed so consistently high quality and battle-hardened for so many years; and the community and my friends (shout out sp-wg) I know you have start Django with one of the first version, what do you think of the evolution of the framework? This is a great question! Thanks for being interested in this history, the Django history is a nice story of having good values and persisting and this actually being successful over the long run. For me thereās all the āback in my dayā stuff thatās not obvious now, like Python not being taken seriously as a ārealā programming language, let alone javascript, but now those tides have very much turned, and web development is considered extremely respectable and high profile, which was unimaginable when I started. Django started in Web1.0 (whatever that meant), and actually grew substantially during Web2.0 and now even in the modern Web3 era is kind of establishing itself into being part of the backbone of the large parts of the internet that arenāt obvious. Thibaud has a list he maintains of websites that he believes use Django, this is great if you havenāt seen it. One of the most impressive parts of the evolution has been how decisions have been made and implemented. In normal āworkā you just have to make things as fast as possible and endlessly add features consequences-be-damned. Open source gets to be fundamentally the opposite. Traditionally one of the defining characteristics of Open Source is that ātime is no objectā. That is good design and implementation can be allowed the time to breathe and be excessively thought through. There is no rush or deadline. While thereās always conflict and drama I think there has been less so in Django than in most other projects as design decisions have been painstakingly threshed out and perfected in mailing lists, tickets, DEPs and forums over the months and years it takes to make them. The people inside see the drama but weāre in the news almost never compared to most projects in the same space. The point is that hypothetically itās possible to try to make the best possible design decisions. In practice most projects donāt do this, but I think Django has demonstrated exemplary maturity in trying to pursue this ideal, and is regularly recognised for it. The original founding team deserve full credit for instilling this culture and each successive group of stewards deserve credit for preserving it. There have (and always will be) missteps. For example CBVs are such an obviously good idea on paper, but in practice people donāt think so. On the other hand Andrew Godwinās implementation of migrations back in the day, that was completely re-writing South from scratch, was truly lovely, even though it was a battle to get to the point of having migrations at all. Thereās the history around the db module, which pretty much everyone was too scared to touch after Malcolm died until there were some impressive breakthroughs in it during the āunder the hoodā sessions not long after DjangoGirls people started coming on board. Django consciously has decided to be extremely considered in its adoption of change and this has been a great thing. Other frameworks have generally been more cavalier, while Django has been steady, careful and reliable. The other full-feature frameworks are kind of in decline, or have hurt themselves by too-much-change-too-fast, while Django has steadily slowly grown and is the trusty go-to tool for a certain kind of job. Now moving forward I see focus on the very subtle things that make the framework nicer to use and understand, On just making the core capabilities better and more reliable and performant, and only very very carefully adding features. In an age where so much quality degradation is occurring, it inspires hope that projects like Django can persist as beacons of high quality, held together by a small group and big community of thoughtful, caring individuals. Hopefully this is something we can continue for a long time into the future also! You are part of the Code of Conduct working group, how is it to work with the working group? Do you have space available for new members? What does it require according to you? Code of Conduct WGs are slightly niche and exposed to a certain kind of work and responsibility. Not to mention that respecting many sensitives and view-points is necessary. It also means having the guts to tell people āthatās not how itās done hereā when it needs to be said. Personally itās a kind of work Iāve grown to be passionate about. I truly believe having a great culture is at the core of community (and really anything good) and can be a complex balancing act of competing factors and emotions. Itās certainly not the kind of thing everyone is into, but if you are, the WG is looking for more diversity, if nothing else itās tending slightly older at the moment. Having said that: Within all of the open source communities from local to international levels thereās always space for people who are willing to turn up and help! Join your local community! Find the parts of community that āspeakā to you. Maybe itās starting a meetup, helping your local conference, running a DjangoGirls. Maybe itās something engineer-related like finally adding something to an open source library that youāre into, adding some beginner docs somewhere, or engaging with Djangonaut Space. Maybe itās something online like helping out in
forum.djangoproject.com,
Reddit or
Discord. As organisers we have this cheat code for finding new people to invite to help more, itās called ālooking for chair-stackersā, that is people who engage to help in the little ways, such as helping stack chairs at the end of an event or generally pack down, wipe up, carry boxes or put things away. Or online: people who go out of their way to try to understand and chip in to manage extra rules, or answer the unanswered thing thatās been sitting there for a while. Or people who just ask ācan I help out with that?ā when the organisers seem tired or stressed out. Having people around who help in these ways has huge value and has been the beginning of many people being involved in communities and making life-long friends and connections. Now more than ever though, itās so important to connect to your community. We are stronger, better and healthier when we are connected to and relied on by other people and we have others we can share our experiences with. Particularly us computer people tend not to be as good with connecting with other people, but everyone should find their way to get out and connect! Itās sometimes hard but itās always better. You have organized many DjangoGirls in Australia, how did you start? Do you have any advice for someone who would like to organize a DjangoGirls event? In 2014 I was living in Perth, Australia, where Russell Keith Magee is based and we had a budding Python/Django User Group. At one of the meetings news emerged about how Ola and Ola were running this thing called āDjangoGirlsā at EuroPython in a few weeks. PyConAU was scheduled a couple of weeks after this. I was like, thatās a great idea, I can absolutely have a go at doing that and emailed them immediately asking if I could copy their materials and plan. We pulled it together with an amazing bunch of people and I think this was technically the 2nd DjangoGirls event ever. In the following years Iāve been involved in many more, including the first North American DjangoGirls. From our Perth series of events a successful organisation was spun off called SheCodes. In the more-than-a-decade since then the world has changed so much! Particularly in the tech world. I would say specifically for DjangoGirls events, they are very region specific. My first advice for organising an event in your region is to see if thereās been one previously and reach out to the event organisers, or at least the nearest organisers ā I think these days there are few places on earth that havenāt had a DjangoGirls event nearish-by. The resources on the website are actually great for getting going and the international DjangoGirls team are lovely, but also always looking for more help. Where I live now, back in the capital, Canberra, we are very well supported for education services. We held a DjangoGirls event a couple of years ago, but for the attendees what emerged was that what we really wanted was just to connect with other technical women. Now what has been very successful for us is an ongoing PyLadies/Womenās Software group who meet up regularly and talk about things that matter to our experience. We use the ālean-coffeeā model and itās been unexpectedly functional. This has been one of the best groups Iāve ever been in with a range of technical women regularly sharing our weird and statistically unusual experiences together, it feeds the soul, and is strongly recommended if you donāt participate in a group like this already. Is there anything else youād like to say? A final shout out to the original leaders of the Django community, for me personally Russell, Jeff, Jacob, Andrew and Baptiste in particular, but everyone who has persisted over the years in just turning up over the long haul and keeping our part of the world as beautiful as can be. My friends Dave, Matt and Jonah. Thibaud is a great president right now. Rarely is there a dedicated Django person who is not absolutely delightful and I feel both proud and honoured to be part of this community. A big thank you to everyone (especially you Sarah! And all the Sarahs, Natalias, Lillys and Olas) who help to make Django what it is. Thank you for doing the interview, Elena !