This week I speak to Tom Christie. He is the creator of the Django Rest Framework, a tool which helps software developers write web APIs. The project is extremely popular, with over 1000 individual contributors and 300,000 users. We spend the first part of the episode discussing DRF - it was really interesting to get an insight into the open source world from such a notable contributor.

Funding is a very important issue for the open-source community - all major companies depend heavily on open-source projects to operate, but don’t always offer much in return. As a result, open source contributors have to be creative in how they seek funding to keep their projects alive. In Tom’s case, he set up an organisation called Encode, which corporate sponsors pay into to fund his work. This was another interesting topic of discussion for the latter part of our conversation.