DSF member of the month - Simon Charette

For May 2025, we welcome Simon Charette as our DSF member of the month! ⭐

Simon Charette is a longtime Django contributor and community member. He served on the Django 5.x Steering Council and is part of the Security team and the Triage and Review team. He has been a DSF member since November 2014.
You can learn more about Simon by visiting Simon's GitHub Profile.

Let’s spend some time getting to know Simon better!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc)

My name is Simon Charette and I'm based in Montréal. I've been contributing to Django for over a decade mainly to the ORM and I have a background in software engineering and mathematics. I work as a principal backend engineer at Zapier where we use Python and Django to power many of our backend services. Outside of Django and work I like to spend time cycling around the world, traveling with my partner, and playing ultimate frisbee.

Out of curiosity, your GitHub profile picture appears to be a Frisbee, is it correct? If so, have you been playing for a long time?

I've been playing ultimate frisbee since college which is around the time I started contributing to Django. It has been a huge part of my life since then as I made many friends and met my partner playing through the years. My commitment to ultimate frisbee can be reflected in my volume of contributions over the past decade as it requires more of my time during certain periods of the year. It also explains why I wasn't able to attend most DjangoCon in spring and fall as this is usually a pretty busy time for me. I took part in the world championships twice and I played in the UFA for about 5 years before retiring three years ago. Nowadays I still play but at a lower intensity level and I am focused on giving back to the community through coaching.

How did you start using Django?

Back in college I was working part time for a web agency that had an in house PHP framework and was trying to determine which tech stack and framework they should migrate to in order to ease onboarding of their developers and reduce their maintenance costs. I was tasked, with another member of the team, to identify potential candidates and despite my lack of familiarity with Python at the time we ended up choosing Django over PHP's Symphony mainly because of its spectacular documentation and third-party app ecosystem.

What other framework do you know and if there is anything you would like to have in Django if you had magical powers?

If I had magical powers I'd invent Python ergonomics to elegantly address the function coloring problem so it's easier for Django to be adapted to an async-ready world. I'm hopeful that the recent development on the GIL removal in Python 3.13+ will result a renewed interest in the usage of threading, which Django is well equipped to take advantage of, over the systematic usage of an event loop to deal with web serving workloads as the async world comes with a lot of often overlooked drawbacks.

What projects are you working on now?

I have a few Django related projects I'm working on mainly relating to ORM improvements (deprecating extra, better usage of RETURNING when available) but the main one has been a tool to keep track of the SQL generated by the Django test suite over time to more easily identity unintended changes that still pass the test suite. My goal with this project is to have a CI invokable command that would run the full Django test suite and provide a set of tests that generated different SQL compared to the target branch so its much easier to identify unintended side effects when making invasive changes to the ORM.

Which Django libraries are your favorite (core or 3rd party)?

• DRF
• django-filter
• django-seal (shameless plug)

What are the top three things in Django that you like?

• The people
• The ORM, unsurprisingly
• The many entry points the framework provides to allow very powerful third-party apps to be used together

You've contributed significantly to improving the Django ORM. What do you believe is the next big challenge for Django ORM, and how do you envision it evolving in the coming years?

The ORM's expression interface is already very powerful but there are effectively some remaining rough edges. I believe that adding generalized support for composite virtual fields (a field composed of other fields) could solve many problems we currently face with how relationships are expressed between models as we currently lack a way to describe an expression that can return tuples of values internally. If we had this building block, adding a way to express and compose table expressions (CTE, subquery pushdown, aggregation through subqueries) would be much easier to implement without denaturing the ORM by turning it into a low level query builder. Many of these things are possible today (e.g. django-cte) but they require a lot of SQL compilation and ORM knowledge and can hardly be composed together.

How did you start to contribute to the ORM? What would be the advice you have for someone interested to contribute to this field?

I started small by fixing a few issues that I cared about and by taking the time to read through Trac, mailing lists, and git-blame for changes in the area that were breaking tests as attempted to make changes. One thing that greatly helps in onboarding on the ORM is to at least have some good SQL fundamentals. When I first started I already had written a MSSQL ORM in PHP which helped me at least understand the idea behind the generation of SQL from a higher level abstraction. Nowadays there are tons of resources out there to help you get started on understand how things are organized but I would suggest this particular video where I attempt to walk through the different phases of SQL generation.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

It has been a pleasure to be able to be part of this community for so long and I'd like to personally thank Claude Paroz for initially getting me interested in contributing seriously to the project.

Thank you for doing the interview, Simon !