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Dawn Wages

Open-source leader & Python engineer

I lead the organizations and communities behind open-source Python, and I still ship the code.

Philadelphia, PA / Remote she/her

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Portrait of Dawn Wages — Django Girls Copenhagen, 2019 · Photo by Bart Pawlik

Leadership

Python Software Foundation
2022–2025

Chair & President · Treasurer · Director

Three years on the board of the nonprofit behind Python. I looked after a $5M budget, the audit and the Form 990, worked with the Executive Director on staffing and long-range plans, and got 12 directors to agree on packaging, security and grants policy.
Anaconda
2025–2026

Director, Community & Developer Relations

I ran community and developer relations for a platform with more than 50 million users, including how we worked with 501(c)(3)s, 501(c)(6)s and open-source foundations. I brought five engineering teams and more than a dozen open-source projects under one open-source plan.
Djangonaut Space
2023–

Co-creator

A mentorship program that gets new people contributing to Django. The Django Software Foundation funds it now. In 2024 we had 46 participants and 80 merged pull requests.
DjangoCon US & DjangoCon Africa
2019–2023

Sponsors Chair

I ran sponsorship for DjangoCon US five years in a row, and for DjangoCon Africa in 2023. Together that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Django community.
At The Root
2020–

Founder

I wrote the Antiracist Ethical Source License, the first anti-racist ethical source license, and released it on Juneteenth 2022.

Building

Python is home base. I’ve built research data pipelines and plenty of Django backends, and lately I’m rooting for Python to get sticky in new places, like on-device and local-first AI.

Satyrn Jupyter for agents, built local-first for Python developers. Domain-Driven Django A book in progress on domain-driven design and event-driven architecture for Django.

Wildflower Software My Python and Django consultancy. I mostly help small teams and nonprofits with their backends and data.

Star Trek Demos Python demos, with a Star Trek twist.

Speaking

All talks Speaker rider

Keynotes, panels, podcasts and a lot of hallway track. Lately I talk about Python environments, AI that’s correct and not just convincing, and the people who keep open source running.