For February 2026, we welcome Baptiste Mispelon as our DSF member of the month! â Photo by Bartek Pawlik -
bartpawlik.format.com Baptiste is a long-time Django and Python contributor who co-created the Django Under the Hood conference series and serves on the Ops team maintaining its infrastructure. He has been a DSF member since November 2014. You can learn more about Baptiste by visiting
Baptiste's website and
his GitHub Profile. Letâs spend some time getting to know Baptiste better! Can you tell us a little about yourself? (hobbies, education, etc) I'm a French immigrant living in Norway. In the day time I work as software engineer at
Torchbox building Django and Wagtail sites. Education-wise I'm a "self-taught" (whatever that means) developer and started working when I was very young. In terms of hobbies, I'm a big language nerd and I'm always up for a good etymology fact. I also enjoy the outdoor whether it's on a mountain bike or on foot (still not convinced by this skiing thing they do in Norway, but I'm trying). How did you start using Django? I was working in a startup where I had built an unmaintainable pile of custom framework-less PHP code. I'd heard of this cool Python framework and thought it would help me bring some structure to our codebase. So I started rewriting our services bit-by-bit and eventually switched everything to Django after about a year. In 2012, I bought a ticket to DjangoCon Europe in Zurich and went there not knowing anyone. It was one of the best decisions of my life: the Django community welcomed me and has given me so much over the years. What other framework do you know and if there is anything you would like to have in Django if you had magical powers? I've been making website for more than two decades now, so I've used my fair share of various technologies and frameworks, but Django is still my "daily driver" and the one I like the best. I like writing plain CSS, and when I need some extra bit of JS I like to use Alpine JS and/or HTMX: I find they work really well together with Django. If I had magical powers and could change anything, I would remove the word "patch" from existence (and especially from the Django documentation). What projects are you working on now? I don't have any big projects active at the moment, I'm mostly working on client projects at work. Which Django libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)? My favorite Django library of all time is possibly
django-admin-dracula. It's the perfect combination of professional and whimsical for me. Other than that I'm also a big fan of the
Wagtail CMS. I've been learning more and more about it in the past year and I've really been liking it. The code feels very Django-y and the community around it is lovely as well. What are the top three things in Django that you like? 1) First of course is the people. I know it's a cliche but the community is what makes Django so special. 2) In terms of the framework, what brought me to it in the first place was its opinionated structure and settings. When I started working with Django I didn't really know much about web development, but Django's standard project structure and excellent defaults meant that I could just use things out of the box knowing I was building something solid. And more than that, as my skills and knowledge grew I was able to swap out those defaults with some more custom things that worked better for me. There's room to grow and the transition has always felt very smooth for me. 3) And if I had to pick a single feature, then I'd go for one that I think is underrated:
assertQuerySetEqual(). I think more people should be using it! What is it like to be in the Ops team? It's both very exciting and very boring đ
Most of the tasks we do are very mundane: create DNS records, update a server, deploy a fix. But because we have access and control over a big part of the infrastructure that powers the Django community, it's also a big responsibility which we don't take lightly. I know you were one of the first members of the Django Girls Foundation board of directors. That's amazing! How did that start for you? By 2014 I'd become good friend with Ola & Ola and in July they asked me to be a coach at the very first Django Girls workshop at EuroPython in Berlin. The energy at that event was amazing an unlike any other event I'd been a part of, so I got hooked. I went on to coach at many other workshops after that. When Ola & Ola had the idea to start an official entity for Django Girls, they needed a token white guy and I gladly accepted the role! You co-created Django Under the Hood series which, from what I've heard, was very successful at the time. Can you tell us a little more about this conference and its beginnings? I'm still really proud of having been on that team and of what we achieved with this conference. So many stories to tell! I believe it all started at the
Django Village conference where Marc Tamlin and I were looking for ideas for how to bring the Django core team together. We thought that having a conference would be a good way to give an excuse (and raise funds) for people to travel all to the same place and work on Django. Somehow we decided that Amsterdam was the perfect place for that. Then we were extremely lucky that a bunch of talented folks actually turned that idea into a reality: Sasha, Ola, Tomek, Ola, Remco, Kasia (and many others) đ. As a former conference organizer and volunteer, do you have any recommendations for those who want to contribute or organize a conference? I think our industry (and even the world in general) is in a very different place today than a decade ago when I was actively organizing conferences. Honestly I'm not sure it would be as easy today to do the things we've done. My recommendation is to do it if you can. I've forged some real friendships in my time as an organizer, and as exhausting and stressful as it can be, it's also immensely rewarding in its own way. The hard lesson I'd also give is that you should pay attention to who gets to come to your events, and more importantly who doesn't. Organizing a conference is essentially making a million decisions, most of which are really boring. But every decision you make has an effect when it's combined with all the others. The food you serve or don't serve, the time of year your event takes place, its location. Whether you spend your budget on fun tshirts, or on travel grants. All of it makes a difference somehow. Do you remember your first contribution in Django? I do! It was commit
ac8eb82abb23f7ae50ab85100619f13257b03526: a one character typo fix in an error message đ Is there anything else youâd like to say? Open source is made of people, not code. You'll never go wrong by investing in your community. Claude will never love you back. Thank you for doing the interview, Baptiste !