Welcome Our New Fellow - Jacob Tyler Walls
We are pleased to welcome Jacob Tyler Walls as the newest member of the Django Fellowship team. Jacob joins Natalia Bidart and Sarah Boyce, who continue in their roles as Django Fellows.
Jacob is a full-stack developer and open-source maintainer with five years of experience using and contributing to Django. He got involved in open source thanks to music technology. After majoring in music and philosophy at Williams College, Jacob earned a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania. Programming coursework both fed into his creative output and also led to roles as a Python generalist working on music information retrieval and as a developer for an interactive music theory instruction site using Django.
As a member of Django’s Triage & Review Team, Jacob is passionate about software testing and eager to pay forward the mentorship he received as a contributor. Jacob also co-maintains the Python projects music21 and pylint.
Most recently, as part of his work as a core developer of Arches, an open-source Django/Vue framework for managing cultural heritage data, Jacob had the opportunity to explore the expressive potential of Django’s ORM. He gave a DjangoCon talk on his experience adapting QuerySets to work with highly generic data access patterns and an analogous talk for an audience of Arches developers. Since 2022, he has focused on developing GIS-powered Django apps at Azavea and later Farallon Geographics.
When time permits, Jacob continues to teach music theory, including most recently as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Delaware. (Perhaps another time Django Reinhardt will end up on the syllabus.)
You can find Jacob on GitHub as @jacobtylerwalls and follow occasional musical updates at jacobtylerwalls.com
Thank you to all the applicants to the Fellowship. We hope to expand the program in the future, and knowing there are so many excellent candidates gives us great confidence as we work toward that goal.
