Flapping Head

An informal survey of the Django community

This week, Andrew and I launched the Django Gigs website to help employers find Django developers. Andrew wrote about it and thanks to the Django Community feed aggregator we had quite a few visitors in the first couple of days.

It’s clear that Django is catching on and growing in popularity. The djangoproject.com site is getting close to 8 million hits each month. I thought it would be interesting to analyse my logs and see what I could tell about the Django community, or at least the section of it that read the blog and visited the Django Gigs website.

Visitors

1280 unique IP addresses

The number of IP addresses seems a pretty good indication of how many unique visitors we had in about two days.

Platforms

The platforms is a pretty even split among Windows, Mac and Linux. Which given the dominance of Windows on the desktop suggests Django is disproportionately popular with Mac OS X and Linux users. I suspect this is the case with Python in general, but I don’t have any stats to back that up.

Browsers

No big surprise here: Firefox is the daddy.

One thing that surprised me was the number of different user agents. There were 408 unique user agent strings! Of course, most of them were from different versions of the same software. IE on Windows likes to report versions of the .NET framework and various browser extension installed on the machine.

Countries

Honourable mentions (1-5 visitors): Slovenia, Denmark, Romania, Greece, Republic of Korea, Serbia and Montenegro, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Philippines, Israel, Croatia, Estonia, Colombia, Peru, Slovakia, Thailand, Turkey, Malaysia, Chile, Puerto Rico, Latvia, Hungary, Belarus, Mexico, Kenya, Kuwait, Nigeria, Lithuania, Argentina, Bolivia, Europe, Iran, Islamic Republic of, Dominican Republic, Moldova, Republic of, Bulgaria, Jamaica, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan.

I used the free version of GeoIP from MaxMind to look up countries from IP addresses. It’s not totally accurate, but good enough.

It’s very easy to use from Python, assuming you have the library installed:

import GeoIP
geo = GeoIP.new(GeoIP.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE)
print geo.country_name_by_addr('4.4.4.4')

It’s not surprising that North America and Western Europe are well represented, but Russia, Brazil and Australia seem to have a good Django following also.

We are the world

Obviously this is just a sample of the Django community and may not be representative, but it does given an indication that Django developers are spread across the world and across the major platforms. That can only be a good thing for the continued growth and success of the framework.