Django developers: We are the world

29 September 2007

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

510 Windows
373 Mac OS X (including 4 iPhones)
312 Linux
85 Other (mostly bots, feed aggregator sites, a handful of BSD)

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

875 Firefox
148 Safari
40 IE
36 Camino
13 Konqueror
168 Other (mostly bots or feed readers like NetNewsWire)

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

423 United States
133 France
126 United Kingdom
67 Germany
61 Canada
45 Russian Federation
42 Brazil
34 Australia
33 Netherlands
23 Italy
16 Belgium
16 China
16 Spain
15 Poland
15 Sweden
14 India
13 Norway
13 Singapore
13 Switzerland
13 Austria
13 Japan
9 Ireland
8 Ukraine
8 New Zealand
7 Finland
7 Portugal
6 Czech Republic
5 Saudi Arabia
5 Iceland

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.

Filed under: Django — Scott @ 1:03 pm

3 Comments »

  1. Just some quick stats from djangosnippets.org to round out the picture:

    * Top countries visitors come from: US, Germany, UK, China, Italy, Russia.
    * Top languages: English, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish.
    * Browser breakdown: Firefox by a landslide, then Safari, then IE.

    There are also a number of language- or country-specific Django user groups as well; the Django wiki’s got a list (http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoUsers), but the most active seem to be the Brazilian group (over two hundred members on their mailing list), followed by French and Spanish.

    Comment by James Bennett — 30 September 2007 @ 2:39 am

  2. GeoIP i on my ever growing ToDo-List :(

    Comment by macdet — 30 September 2007 @ 6:55 am

  3. I’ve posted a summary of visitors to the Django Sites website on my blog at http://www.rossp.org/blog/2007/oct/01/django-diverse-community/

    Some of the statistics are quite similar while others vary a little, most likely due to our relevant target audiences.

    Thanks to both you & James for providing some interesting stats.

    Comment by Ross Poulton — 1 October 2007 @ 3:02 am

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