About Your Django Story

“Your Django Story” is a volunteer-run interview series for the Django Girls blog that features women who make awesome things with Python and Django.

Each week we feature a new developer who tells us about how she got started on her journey with code, what she did before becoming a programmer, the cool things she’s currently working on, and much more. Each interview also features advice for aspiring developers, which is always a great read!

Many of the women we’ve featured got their start at Django Girls workshops, and went on to found their own companies, secure full-time jobs as developers, and run Django Girls events.

In 2015, we were thrilled to feature the following stories:

Jan 2: Ana Krivokapić

Jan 5: Joanna Tustanowska

Jan 9: Carol Willing

Jan 12: Eleni Lixourioti

Jan 16: Alja Isaković

Jan 19: Giorgia Amici

Jan 26: Claudia Vicol

Feb 2: Magdalena Noffke

Feb 9: Emily Manders

Feb 16: Joldeen Mirembe

Feb 23: Emily Karungi

March 2: Kaja Milanowska

March 9: Cea Stapleton

March 16: Caroline Simpson

March 23: Corryn Smith

March 30: Lynn Asiimwe

April 6: Agata Tyśnicka

April 13: Victoria Martínez de la Cruz

April 20: Jamillah Mayombwe

April 27: Lieke Boon

May 4: Lacey Williams Henschel

May 11: Stacey Haysler

May 18: Agata Grdal

May 25: Barbara Shaurette

June 1: Allison Lacker

June 8: Andrea Gonzalez

June 15: Sara Gore

June 22: Naomi Ceder

June 29: Iulia Chiriac

July 6: Leslie Ray

July 13: Marina Mele

July 20: Ana Balica

July 27: Lorena Mesa

August 3: Vivian Guillen

August 10: Cynthia Monastirsky

August 17: Nicole Harris

August 24: Michela Ledwidge

August 31: Michela Dai Zovi

September 7: Lucie Daeye

September 21: Jessica Hamrick

September 28: Sonia Arcelay

October 5: Tapasweni Pathak

October 12: Jordan Decker

October 19: Szilvia Kádár

October 26: Michelle Glauser

November 2: Adrienne Lowe

November 9: Shauna Gordon-McKeon

November 16: Tricia Campbell

November 23: Andromeda Yelton

November 30: Kinga Kięczkowska

December 7: Kaisa Filppula

December 21: Anna Schneider

December 28: Amber Brown

And in 2016:

January 25: Katie Bell

February 1: Safia Abdalla

February 8: Aisha Bello

February 15: Manisha Sharma

March 7: Anastasia Panchenko

March 21: Sarah Holderness

March 28: Irene Nandutu

April 4: Cassidy Lamb

April 11: Emylle Chrystinne

April 20: Julie Barbic

April 25: Margaret Myrick

May 20: Jessica McCay

June 13: Kelsey Gilmore-Innis

June 20: Felice Ho

June 27: Anna Makarudze

August 8: Katerina Kampardi

And in 2018:

January 30: Cristina Motinha Martins

January 31: Muriel Green

February 1: Akanni Busayo Motunrayo

February 2: Caroline Ochieng

March 18: Leona So

May 6: Marisa Reyes

To learn a bit more about how this series got its start, you can read our first post here, and our first interview, with Ola Sitarska, here!

If you’re an amazing Django Girl and want to tell us your story, or if you’d like to nominate someone to be featured, please email us at story@djangogirls.org. We would love to hear from you!

Your Django Story: Meet Päivi Suomela

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Päivi Suomela is a junior full-stack developer at GWDevices, where she uses Django, Python, C# and JavaScript. Päivi attended a Django Girls workshop in March of 2015 and has been working as a developer since summer 2015. She helped to arrange a Django Girls workshop in Coventry in 2015 and is now organizing Django Girls Sheffield. She is originally from Finland but currently lives in Sheffield, UK.

How did your story with code start?

In my previous job I used Excel a lot and I taught myself to write some macros to speed things up. I noticed I enjoyed doing that, so I decided to try to learn more coding. I started to look for courses and tutorials online. One of the first things I learned was some Java in order to create simple Android apps for my phone. Then I heard about the first Django Girls workshop ever and applied to that, but I was not selected that time. I went through some Python tutorials on my own and was later accepted to the Django Girls workshop in London (March 2015). After that I spent a lot of time learning more and more programming, and about six months ago, I got my first ever developer job. It is a junior role in a small business and I love it!

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I moved to England about 8 years ago and had been doing different customer service jobs, nothing too exciting.

What do you love the most about coding?

I love the feeling of making something work, especially something that I found difficult and then suddenly it all clicks together and just works! It gives me a great sense of accomplishment.

Why Django?

After coding with Java I found Python and Django to be lovely and simple. I also fell in love with the Django Girls movement – the workshop in London gave me the push I needed to start chasing programming as a career. I like Django as there are a lot of good tutorials out there, it is usually easy to find examples of something you want to build. I learn best by seeing an example and then mucking about with it, Django makes that easy as there are lots of good materials available for free. (Like the Django Girls tutorial.) I also really like the Django community and have met some awesome people, everyone is really supportive and friendly.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I’ve just ordered myself a Pi Zero and I am hoping to use that to build something fun. I don’t know what yet, but I am hoping it will be something cool! I am also hosting a BBC Micro:Bit for a week and I am super excited about that. The website shows what other people have already made with Python and the Micro:bit and tracks 5 Micro:bits as they travel around the world. If anyone is interested in contributing to this project, the website has information on how to get involved.

What are you most proud of?

I am proud of having changed my career and becoming a developer. It still feels a bit unreal to me.

What are you curious about?

Lots of things!

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I’m still spending time to learn more coding, I feel like I have a long way to go and lots of things to learn. I also like playing computer games, I am currently spending way too much time playing Heroes of the Storm! Board games are fun too when I can find people to play with me.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

When I first started to program I was really intimidated by the number of different languages out there – everyone seemed to have a different opinion on which language is a good one to learn first and which ones should be avoided. My advice would be just to pick one and stick with it for a while, after understanding one it will be easier to pick up others. I’d also recommend anyone to go to their local meetups – I’ve met lots of interesting people by going to the Python and JavaScript groups in Sheffield. People are friendly and want to help, it doesn’t matter if you are a total beginner. Meetups are also a good place to hear about possible job opportunities!

How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?

The Django Girls workshop I attended was just what I needed, it gave me more confidence. It was nice to hear stories of other women who had become developers despite not having studied CS at university, it made me realise that I could do it too. As I enjoyed the workshop so much, I decided I want to help arrange more of them to give other people a chance to learn programming. I helped to run the workshop in Coventry at PyCon UK 2015, and I am now planning a workshop in Sheffield for February this year. I have a feeling that this workshop won’t be the last…

I like how the Django Girls are so welcoming for new coders, I made my first pull requests ever to the Django Girls website. It is a nice and gentle way to get involved with an open source project and learn the basics without the fear of someone telling you off for having made a mistake, all the feedback is friendly and encouraging.

Thank you so much, Päivi!

If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), please email us at story@djangogirls.org!

Adrienne Lowe

@adriennefriend

Workshops in 3 countries of Latin America

We want to share with you our experience of being part of the organization of 6 Django Girls Workshops in 3 different countries and motivate you to organize one by yourself because… We think it’s just an amazing thing to do and it make you really happy!

Thanks to the project “Argentina en Python“ we were able to organize 4 Django Girls Workshop in 4 months (since August to November) and 2 more are coming in January. Wohoo!

The first one was in August 22, in Cochabamba, Bolivia (pictures). It was our first experience and we were too nervous. Hopefully, it was just amazing and a lot of women from different background went to the workshop -chemistry, lawyer, mechanic engineer, designer, journalist, odontologist, that was amazing. Besides, a woman with her little some-months-aged boy sleeping in her lap worked during the whole day on the tutorial and she made it!. Unhappily, we had to leave people out because we had around ~70 appliances and our spaces was available up to 30.

The week after this one, we went to Santa Cruz, Bolivia (pictures) where we repeated the experience in the university, so the background was more homogenize. Most of them were studying in the same university and they almost didn’t need help from us.

In October 3, we organize another in Puno, Perú (pictures) in another university. Besides the appliance was over exceeded not too many people came. We suppose that we made a mistake with the email confirmation, because after the workshop I was told that some people receive the email in their SPAM folder. On the other hand, local developers told me that Puno is not an “easy city” -they tried to do some Software Libre events before and they didn’t have too many concurrence so… Who knows?

By the middle of November, we organized Django Girls Mendoza (pictures) at the PyCon Argentina. I can say this was the biggest one. First, because we already had more experience on the topic and also because “LinuxChix Argentina” joined us on the organization and they worked really hard! Second, because it happened inside a PyCon and we had everything we requested without too many worries, even the public. Some days after we opened the registration, we have all the seats covered.

• Finally, I want to say that, yes, it takes some time to organize an event, but I will guarantee you that it takes too less time that you could ever imagine (we organize the second one in ONE WEEK!). You have to read all the manual guides written by Django Girls and I personally recommend you to follow them as much as you can (because they are great!), but don’t hesitate if you can’t follow some specific things. For example, we had to adapt some things to make them more local / regional to the situation in Latin America:

• Many people here do not have email account (or even Internet): we went to some local newspaper to spread the word about the workshop. We also went to a local TV show :D
• Ask for other ways to communicate with attendees: ask them not just for email account, but maybe Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp. People here is more likely to use those social network than an email account.
• A lot of people want to be in touch with the technology but they don’t have a notebook: we talked to “Proyecto mARTadero” who helped us by providing a HackLab with about 20 desktop PC to develop our workshop.
• If you can’t get money from sponsors do not cancel the workshop. For example, add a FAQ were you explain that attendees will have to pay for their food at lunch. That’s totally normal, we are sharing knowledge, not buying food. That’s an extra point ;) . The same happen with T-Shirts, pins, stickers and all the material that it’s mentioned in the guide. They are *not a must*
• Ask local universities for a room they maybe can share with you for that day. Saturdays are not a too populated day in the universities, so they won’t have any issue with that and you will have a really good place to spread the word.
• Before starting the hard work the day of the workshop, try to create an atmosphere. Prepare a welcome talk and talk about the local communities and why is so important to share the knowledge. It’s not just about coding, it’s also about create/grow communities. Even more in those small cities where there are no too much IT movement.
• Be careful with the forms. Ask questions that allow you to have a bare idea about how much the person is motivated. You don’t want people in the workshop that is not motivated with the technology…
• Please, allow men in your workshop. Apply the “+1 rule” if you want. You will want to avoid the gender discussion in all the social networks about "Why men are not allowed?”. This could cause some problems to the organizers that later will have to explain that it’s an initiative to empower women in the IT world. So, you can make the convocation to women, but in the website you can explain better about the “+1 rule” (but giving priority to women) and invite them to come to the Workshop with a girl friend to be accepted.
  
• Buy some fruits not just cupcakes. They are nutritive, tasty and not too expensive. Besides, it’s too much “easy” to eat and keep working on what you have been doing. If I eat a lot of cupcakes I want to go bed ;)
• After the workshop try to create some kind of contact network about the participant. They will want to be in touch each other but without sending you a message to ask about the email of another person. So, make them to participate in a way that “maybe” doesn’t involve you. Here, mailing lists are not an option, nobody knows about them. Try to adapt the medium to the region. Here is Facebook, and yes, I don’t like it but it works :(
• Take pictures and record some small videos during the workshop (maybe a little interview to the attendees) and in the goodbye talk show them to all the attendees. It’s always good watching yourself in the data-projector next to your new friends and listen to other class-mate thoughts. This will also help for the next point :D
• At the end, before leaving, invite attendees to share their experience in the front desk (you will be surprised -they have a lot to say and it’s an amazing/emotive feedback. I cried sometimes), if they are shy and don’t want to talk, motivate them by giving something as a gift: stickers, TShirt for example.
• Let them know that “nothing is required” to organize another Django Girls: “After doing this workshop, you have all the knowledge to be a coach in the following, right? You finished it! So, you will be able to help others with the problems you have already solved. Also, there are a lot of people that will help you to make it even better than this one”
• Certificates. Please, if you have the chance, give to the attendees a paper saying: “This person has participated in the Django Girls Workshop”. It hasn’t to be official and it means nothing, but sometime there are people that need it for the job. Maybe the company has paid the trip or maybe the workshop was in a work day and they need to justify the absence. You can ask about this in the appliance form.

Now, the best part of this blog post: let’s talk about donations :) . Why I say it’s the best part? Because it’s the engine of all we have done. Without donations, it had not existed. So, we need your help to keep bringing Python, Django, programming, and Software Libre to many more cities in Perú, Ecuador (next March) and Colombia (we don’t know the date yet). Would you help us? Please donate here.

It’s not just about money. You can collaborate with us by providing us contact of people that could be interested in helping us on the organization of a new workshop in those countries. We rely a lot on the local communities to get some accommodation help, sponsors for the workshops, suggestion about where to fix the car o places we should visit, teacher of some university and advice like “You shouldn’t leave the city without tasting the local beer” :D

Thank you all for what you are built with Django Girls and I hope it keep growing! It’s an amazing community.

If you want to follow our adventures, we are @argenpython in Twitter and “Argentina en Python” in Facebook. I hope to meet you soon in an international Django Girls Workshop :D

Your Django Story: Meet Heather Bryant

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Heather Bryant is director of Project Facet, an open source journalism software project that’s working to streamline the editorial process and help newsrooms collaborate.

How did your story with code start?

When I first got involved in journalism I was very much fascinated with the process and the tools of doing journalism. I spent most of my career on the digital side, building media websites and editorial products and I reached a certain point where I felt like I had reached a limit in what I was able to learn on my own. I was accepted into Hackbright Academy last year and that’s where my introduction to Python began.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

Well, my original plan for life was that I was going to save all the animals and so I went to school for wildlife biology and studied for about 3 years before I discovered how much I loved journalism. It was a natural progression from being a digital journalist working on media websites to being a programmer.

What do you love the most about coding?

At any given time I have about a dozen ideas falling out of my brain for things I want to exist. Coding gives me the power to make those ideas real without having to wait for someone else to do it.

Why Django?

I learned programming through Python. When I was working out how to build Facet, Django quickly became a frontrunner as a framework best suited to what I am trying to accomplish. I also appreciate the symmetry in that Django was born in a newsroom and this project is for newsrooms.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

My life is all Facet all the time right now but in the best way. Much of my journalism career has been spent in small newsrooms in Alaska. These are fascinating places covering incredible stories. Alaska is a vast state, but like many news organizations, the newsrooms there do their work with small teams and small budgets.

It’s entirely common to go from covering stories about dog sled racing to military training exercises to scientific research, politics or the vibrant art scene all in the same week. And just as common to be one of few people in a newsroom responsible for covering those stories across thousands of square miles. This experience really informed my idea for Facet. But it’s not just geographic distance that makes collaboration essential for the success of small newsrooms. It’s a necessity everywhere.

Small newsrooms don’t have the technical resources to build their own tools and technologies to help them do their jobs. Most newsrooms use an complex system of third­party tools to manage the process. This means few newsrooms have the same system. And while they need to be able to collaborate and many want to, the sheer variety in editorial workflows and those varied toolsets make collaboration a tricky process. Facet is the common tool that gets out of the way and help newsrooms do the work they need to do.

Facet started coming to life shortly after I graduated Hackbright Academy and joined the education team there. In July, I received a grant to continue the work from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Prototype Fund.

What are you most proud of?

I’m thoroughly enjoying the process of running and coding a passion project and watching it develop into a funded open source project. It’s a very fulfilling and rewarding process. I’m proud that I followed through with my idea instead of just saying “gee, it would nice if this tool existed.” I applied for grants without much expectation at all. It’s very easy to write off such a thing as luck or good timing and reminding myself that’s just imposter syndrome speaking is a regular thing. Facet might turn out to be a thing I make and release into the world, or it could very well turn into my career. Either way I’m excited to see where it goes.

What are you curious about?

I’m fascinated by the future of algorithmically generated news and contextually aware news. I want to make sure that’s it not just large newsrooms with developers on staff that have access to the tools to do this kind of storytelling, but that small, rural and other non­metro newsrooms also have tools to do groundbreaking local journalism in service of their communities.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

When I’m not behind a computer, I love picking up my camera and putting my photojournalism background to use. I can also easily kill hours on videogames or playing with design in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

There will be so many times when you have an error or a bug of some sort that just stumps you. That is not an indicator of whether or not you will be a successful programmer. Everyone has those days. How you handle it is what will determine your success as a programmer. You will definitely have days where you will have no idea what’s going on. That’s completely okay. You don’t have know everything, you just have to be open to learning anything.

It’s easy to fall into the cycle of eternal preparation before doing.

“If I take one more online course, or I do one more hackathon then I can start to make this cool thing…”

No.

Start making that cool thing right now. Don’t get caught up so much in planning that you never do the thing you wanted to do in the first place.

How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?

I loved the supportive nature of the DjangoGirls workshop. It was very much a judgement free place where it was okay to make mistakes or break code and learn from it. I’m very glad to be a part of the Django community and look forward to the opportunity to mentor at a future DjangoGirls workshop.

Thank you so much, Heather!

If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), please email us at story@djangogirls.org!

Adrienne Lowe

@adriennefriend

Your Django Story: Meet K. Rain Leander

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

K. Rain Leander is a systematic, slightly psychic, interdisciplinary developer evangelist with a Bachelor’s in dance and a Master’s in IT. An epic public speaker, she has disappeared within a box stuffed with swords, created life, and went skydiving with the Queen. Seriously. Rain is an active technical contributor with RDO manager, OpenStack, Django Girls, and Project DO. Come say hello. Bring cake.

How did your story with code start?

My first computer was a TI-99/4A, a clunky keyboard thing you connected to a television to program BASIC. I followed the instruction manual it came with to build a little dancing robot graphic. It was awesome until I figured out you couldn’t do anything else with it. Years later it wasn’t a big deal to teach myself HTML / CSS / javascript / PHP when I wanted to supplement my dance career with web development. I ended up getting a Master’s in IT and becoming a support engineer after retiring from dance.

But.

How did my most recent story with code continue? I opted to switch to part time after giving birth to my son, but the job I had wasn’t allowed to be part time so my job became to find any (part-time) job within the company. While looking, I attended a Django Girls and LOVED it. It reminded me how much I loved coding and the job search for anything part time became a job search for anything code related.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

See, that’s a tough question because I always considered myself a programmer at heart. I love math and puzzles and logic and languages and often applied the scientific method to resolving obstacles. Now what have I done besides programming? That’s a fun question. I have been a cashier, a babysitter, a waitress, a barista, a magician’s assistant, a dancer / choreographer / artistic director, a teacher, a sales assistant, and a receptionist.

What do you love the most about coding?

It’s weird, I realize, but I love finding bugs. When it’s broken and you figure out how to fix it? That’s the best. I mean, it’s also awesome to make things, sure, but squishing bugs is my schtick.

Why Django?

Luck! When I was looking for work, I saw the Django Girls talk at DevConf.cz 2015 which led to googling Django Girls which led to finding the Django Girls workshop in Groningen where I live. I’ll go into this more in a minute.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

During the day, I’m helping build a new quickstart for RDO which is Red Hat’s version of OpenStack TripleO project to make it easier for developers to build their own simple cloud. This will also make it simpler for people to join the TripleO, OpenStack, and RDO communities because they’ll be able to build their own clouds and start coding right away. You can join the open source project on GitHub and I’m also giving talks about it at DevConf.cz, RDO Community day at FOSDEM, and the Virtualization and IaaS room at FOSDEM.

At night I’m working on Project DO which is an idea born and bred during StartUp Weekend Groningen 2015. It’s about leveraging knowledge, community, and coaching to define, refine, plan, and DO projects that you haven’t done yet. 1. What is your goal? 2. What is your timeline? 3. Why do you want to do it? Answering these three simple questions may seem easy, but finding the underlying motivation behind a goal is the key to making it a reality. This is something that I’ve worked with several of my friends to complete career or education goals, but I’d like to start an open source community so that someday a stranger will say, “Ah, yes, I accomplished XYZ via Project DO.”  

What are you most proud of?

My son.

What are you curious about?

What motivates people. How can I help you help yourself. Why is climate change still a debate in some first world countries. How can I break my addiction to sugar. Who let the dogs out. Why does my cat LOVE it when we watch her eat. How can I improve. How can I help others improve. What are the next steps. Did the spinning top fall over at the end of the movie Inception. Why don’t I have a million dollars in my bank account. How can I make the world a better place. How will I be remembered. If it takes half a chicken half a day to lay half an egg, how long does it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle. Everything.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

Swim lessons with my son, reading mostly sci fi / fantasy / fitness / culinary, inhaling anything Doctor Who related, baking scones / cookies / cake, strength training / long walks / yin yoga, daily writing on 750words.com, and working on speaking and leadership skills with Toastmasters.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Two things!

First, learn to google. Finding your own answer is key to being a successful developer, imho. Although, figuring out when to ask others for help is also very important. But, still, learn to google.

Second, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I heard this at some workshop at some point and it really resonated with me. One of the reasons why children are so good at learning things is that they aren’t embarrassed when they make mistakes, they just get back up and try again. Adults have a stumbling block of “feeling stupid” or “looking silly” - give yourself permission to make a mess, learn from it, and progress.

How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?

If I hadn’t attended that Django Girls workshop, I might’ve still ended up where I am, but it might’ve taken longer. Going to that workshop focused the job search and I ended up as the RDO Manager community developer / software engineer with the OpenStack infrastructure team at Red Hat. The first workshop reminded me that I loved to program and shifted my career search as I mentioned before - I attended as a participant because I had zero experience with the django and python languages and while I had extensive programming experience, it was several years old. A few of the chapters from the tutorial were refreshers, like the git, command line, code editor, and HTML chapters, but a few were completely new like the python and django chapters and I had never deployed to heroku which was what we were working with at the time of my first workshop.

I attended the next Django Girls Groningen workshop as a coach, which was awesome, and pretty much amounted to answering questions, helping my coachees go through the tutorial, tweeting and blogging, and helping them google and troubleshoot things when we didn’t know or couldn’t find the answer within the tutorial. I’m attending another Django Girls as a coach, but this time in Den Hague in February and helping plan the next Django Girls Groningen workshop and I hope you can make it!

Thank you so much, Rain!

If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), please email us at story@djangogirls.org.

Adrienne Lowe

@adriennefriend

Your Django Story: Meet Amber Brown

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Amber Brown is a freelance software developer and computering owl lady, with a handful of years in programming and a few more in general IT. Best known as the release manager of the Twisted Project, she’s been invited to speak at several conferences including keynoting PyCon Czech Republic ‘15, DjangoCon Australia ‘15, and speaking at Django Under The Hood ‘15. She’s a head organiser of Perth{Web}Girls, the amalgamation of Django Girls and either Rails Girls or a new HTML/CSS-based workshop, ran on the same day. She is also a member of the Django Code of Conduct Committee. Photo credit: Bartek Pawlik, licensed.

How did your story with code start?

I started in high-school, finding a dubiously licensed copy of Visual Basic 6 which I ran off a USB drive, and wrote various utilities – a networked chat program, a few games, that sort of thing. This had utility at my job at the time, as an IT support worker at a small local government – we were vastly understaffed, and so my little automation tools saved us hours a day.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was in IT – but I was really always one. It’s only recently it became my job focus. I’ve moved from Windows desktop maintenance to software dev full time – but it’s surprising where the teachings from my Microsoft-y past help.

What do you love the most about coding?

That I can write things that people find useful, and can improve their lives – software is a means to an end, but it’s a means I very much enjoy.

Why Django?

That’s an interesting question, and as I don’t really use Django in my day to day work, is one I can’t really answer. As a Twisted (asynchronous networking framework) core dev, Django has some interest to me as something we can run *on* Twisted, but it’s not something I use very often. I do, however, use bits of Forms when I can, as it’s a very useful module. I did use Django full time in the past, and I do enjoy the ease-of-use and rapid development aspects.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

Cool is a relative term – but I’m working on pulling useful modules out of Twisted, and into dependency-less modules that the greater ecosystem can use, without pulling in all of Twisted to use one little bit. My hope is that these useful modules gain wider use outside of just those that use Twisted as the framework for the project.

What are you most proud of?

Getting invited as a keynote speaker for three (!!) conferences, and getting invited to talk at Django Under The Hood – it was rather amazing for the Django Core devs to want me to speak, and fantastic that a lot of them listened, even if they don’t always agree with me!

What are you curious about?

Space! I am curious about space. No matter how dark, empty, and uninviting it is.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I like to play games! Worth mentioning is Magic The Gathering (eldrazi OP), XCOM: The Long War (marksman rifle OP), and Wargame: Red Dragon (T-90S OP). I also like gardening.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Persist! Persistence is key, and it’s what keeps us the rest of us going.

Be wary of burnout! Burnout is the feeling when it gets impossible to enjoy what you’re doing. It’s okay to be burnt out and want to not do things, listen to yourself and relax when that becomes an issue.

Never trust the network! Did you know that networks are less reliable than most public transport systems? They really are.

How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?

As the organiser of several and mentor of a few more, I have to say that it’s changed my life in terms of how I see teaching. The Django Girls workshop has taught me important lessons for when I do my own, unrelated teaching – start at the bottom, work up with meaningful results at each step of the way, and have a clear, achievable goal at the end.

Thanks Amber!

If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), send an email to story@djangogirls.org!

Adrienne Lowe

@adriennefriend

Your Django Story: Meet Anna Schneider

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Anna Schneider is the CTO of WattTime, a tech nonprofit that cuts the carbon footprint of smart devices. She taught herself Python during her PhD in biophysics, then taught herself Django two years ago while co-founding WattTime.

How did your story with code start?

I got into software development through scientific computing and data analysis. My first lines of code were probably some shell scripts to access the protein structure data I was working on for my undergrad research. I remember writing explanations for “cd”, “ls”, etc in my lab notebook.

When I started my PhD in biophysics at UC Berkeley, I was pretty sure I wanted to join a lab that shot lasers at proteins. Who wouldn’t, right? But I noticed that I kept avoiding the benchwork, and I had much more fun writing Matlab scripts instead. I also wanted to get better at programming to keep my options open for jobs later.

So I decided to join a research group where the tool of choice was code instead of lasers. Scientific computing is weird—most of my fellow grad students didn’t have much programming experience either, but we did have access to one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world! I taught myself Python for data analysis by reading loads of online documentation and StackOverflow. The code snippets included in the numpy, scipy, and scikit-learn docs were lifesavers, and got me started on a path to writing good Pythonic code.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

Depends on how you count it! I only began to feel like a “real programmer” near the end of my PhD, when I started writing Python packages with test suites and sensible object-oriented structure—and that was after more than 5 years of writing code of some sort. Before that, I thought of myself as a scientist who worked on clean energy and photosynthesis, and who just happened to use code to do it.

What do you love the most about coding?

I read this interesting post recently about what kinds of programmers fit well on different teams. In that taxonomy, I feel closest to the “product” and “practical” archetypes: I like solving practical problems in high-level languages, especially if I know the feature will be useful.

Why Django?

Because Python :). Python is the only language where I could have made such a seamless transition from scientist to web developer, while using top-notch modern libraries in both fields.

My first experience with Django was at my first hackathon. That was a pretty great weekend—I met my co-founder, and I met my favorite web framework!

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

At WattTime, our core product is real-time data about the carbon footprint of electricity from the power grid. I’m really passionate about getting our data out in the world because you can save a lot of carbon if you’re able to shift your power usage around even a little bit.

I designed our stack to be Python from the ground up. Our platform is built in Django, with the help of awesome packages like Celery, Django Rest Framework, and Pandas.

What are you most proud of?

I’m proud that I’ve been able to set up a pretty solid workflow for test-driven development and deployment at WattTime. As our only full-time developer, there’s no way I would have been made so much progress so fast without taking the time to learn tools like Pivotal Tracker, Travis CI, Heroku, and New Relic as I went.

What are you curious about?

I’m looking forward to learning more about scaling. We have some bigger Internet of Things brands that we’ll probably start working with soon, so that challenge might come up sooner rather than later!

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I love to create food projects, dance, listen to podcasts, drink fancy cocktails, hike, and hang out with my awesome housemates and their awesome cats.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

If you’re coming to programming from a science background, one amazing resource is Software Carpentry. It’s a volunteer organization specifically aimed at teaching researchers how to write software in a way that encourages reproducible, collaborative science. They run workshops all over the world, and they also have lots of online resources if there’s not a workshop near you.

Thanks Anna!

If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), send an email to story@djangogirls.org!

Adrienne Lowe

@adriennefriend

Django Girls as a keyframe moment

Originally posted on Martin Matusiak‘s blog. Reposted with his permission.

In video compression there is a concept known as the keyframe. The simplest way to store a video recording is to store each frame (let’s say it’s 25 frames per second) as an image, all together in one big file. But people noticed that when progressing from frame to frame most of the image of a frame does not change between frames. That makes sense, otherwise the whole screen would flash constantly. The new model of storing video was to store frame 1 in its entirety, and then for frame 2, frame 3 and onwards you would only store what changed from the previous frame.

This gives enormous gains in terms of filesize and all common video formats use it. But we don’t always view video from frame 1 right up until the end. Sometimes we want to seek backwards and forwards. If we only had one frame in its entirety and then a long sequence of frame changes it would be very expensive (and therefore slow) to calculate what frame 37500 at the 25 minute mark should look like.

That’s why we also have keyframes. A keyframe is simply a frame that is stored in its entirety (like frame 1), which occurs at certain moments in the video. For instance, once every minute (every 1500 frames) we store the whole frame, and in between keyframes we only store changes or “deltas”.

As it happens, keyframes also have a second purpose as an error correction mechanism. If you ever try to play back a video and all you see is the whole screen full of weird purple rectangles with something moving here and there, that’s because the video player is applying changes frame by frame, to a keyframe which is damaged. So all you see is the changes, but not the original image from which the changes have been calculated. And thus it looks like the video is broken. But if you wait long enough, you might reach a keyframe. And once you have a keyframe you have the whole image again, and calculating changes from that image makes the video “work” again.¹ So if some of the keyframes are missing or damaged it breaks part of the video, but not all of it. Keyframes are a mechanism to recover from a partially damaged video file.

We can even view a keyframe as a metaphor in life. A keyframe is a point where we have excellent clarity - we feel we know exactly what we need to keep doing, what we need to stop doing, what we need to start doing. But then the moment passes, we chug along, and after a while it’s not all that easy to measure exactly how much progress we’ve made, or whether we’re headed in the right direction. Not until the next moment of clarity. The next keyframe, if you will.

I’m heading home from Django Girls Bordeaux and as I’m sitting on the plane I realize I’m incredibly at peace with the world today. Nothing seems to bother me at all. As if I’ve just nourished myself on the exact right diet that my body needed. Even physiologically speaking - over the last two days I’ve lived on less food and less sleep than normal. Yet my body kept saying: that’s all we need. Like an engine running on the perfect fuel, at peak performance.

I’ve coached at Django Girls once before, but this time was even better. As “meta coach” my mission was to supplement the coaches - one per team - by helping the participants whose coach was busy, or by helping with obscure problems. In practice I ended up more like a doctor doing rounds - I would quite systematically visit each team and help anyone who needed assistance. This was super awesome, since I had a chance to talk to all the participants and all the coaches.

At its core Django Girls is a really simple idea. We invite a group of women and teach them some basic programming and web development. Big deal, right? But think about the last time you learned some basic programming… What did that lead to? A career in software by any chance? A life long interest in programming perhaps? So you see, it *is* a big deal. It’s actually one of the bigger deals out there.

Let me illustrate why.

On Friday night we had a drinks event for the coaches. It was basically like any group of programmers drinking beer and talking shop, with splinters of pip, pypi mirrors, wheels and devpi flying everywhere (mercifully, a critique on the state of python packaging was omitted). For me it was doubly interesting, since that’s literally the first time I’ve ever talked about programming in French.² But I’ve heard a version of that conversation any number of times, and basically it’s a group of coders making fun of and complaining about stuff all night long, albeit in an entertaining manner.³ This is our culture, people. Oh and I forgot to mention that 9 of 10 coaches were male. (But that’s irrelevant, right?) End of scene.

Saturday rolls around, it’s the big day. The room fills with 27 participants and their coaches. Everyone’s ready to roll. The participants are a little shell shocked at first, not surprisingly. How would you feel if you had to type cryptic stuff in a terminal window? But quite soon everyone is humming along nicely. The coaches aren’t talking amongst themselves now, they’re with their teams. And each one is doing a fantastic job. (I saw the whole thing, remember? I was walking around.) They’re being supportive. They’re enthusiastic. They explain things patiently. They help the participants relax and understand that they’re on the right track.

Let me repeat that in case you got distracted for a second. The *participants* are making the *coaches* better. They’re making *us* think and feel more positive and have more fun than usual.

And the participants? Well, where do I start? When is the last time you had the courage and the patience to spend 9 hours learning something new? Something that many people think “isn’t for people like yourself”? Right, chew on that one for a minute. You see, Django Girls isn’t like being in school where you mindlessly sit through one class after another. The people who participate are motivated to learn. They work through a tutorial that, despite having been written for beginners, is full of technical terms they’ve never heard before.⁴ They’re expected to learn mostly through reading and performing exercises. They’re expected to absorb a lot of knowledge throughout the day. They’re expected to show a lot of patience and perseverance. And boy do they ever. Not only that, they are some of the nicest and most fun people you could ever spend a day with.

So you see, it’s not that we’re doing them a favor because one can have a nice career in IT these days. You don’t have to work in IT to have an awesome career, there are many other options. “We” need “them” much more than “they” need “us”.⁵

They are beginners. That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s actually an awesome thing. They didn’t come up through our computer science programs. They didn’t cut their teeth on PHP back when it was just C macros.⁶ They come from a different background, with a different mindset, and a fresh perspective. They’re not jaded like us, joking around about how broken software is. And we, the coaches, are seeing it through their eyes. Why is coaching at Django Girls so fulfilling? Because wow, that’s what programming is *supposed* to be like!

Some highlights that stuck in my mind:

• The participant who said “so a=6 and b=4, but how do you get 24?” Thirty minutes later not only is assignment under control, she says “oh so len and str are functions I can use just like in Excel”?
• The participant who would explain back to me what she had learned, in her own words, and her explanation was dead on every time. Later on she got into a discussion with her coach on the merits of Django vs Wordpress and what you could do/couldn’t do with either one.
• The participant who early in the day was almost too focused to talk. By the afternoon she’d racked up enough wins that she was listening to music on her phone, reading the tutorial out loud and nodding along, totally getting it.
• The participant who finished the whole tutorial with time to spare (trust me, it’s really long) and was browsing sites on code bootcamps while telling me about a site she was planning to build to serve files for use at the library where she works.

And that, to make a long story short, is why someone who’s been a programmer for 20 years is raving about how incredible it is to coach at Django Girls. A moment where everything comes together and everything is awesome. A keyframe moment that reminds me that *this* is what I want my life to be about.

What are the keyframe moments of your life?

1. I say “work” because as far as the video player is concerned a frame is just a bunch of pixels with colors. It has no way of knowing what the frame is supposed to look like.
2. The whole idea of coaching in French was a massive YOLO. It was tough, but it was super fun!
3. I know it extremely well, because in my previous team that was literally my favorite way to pass the time with my programmer buddies.
4. I worked through it myself. Last week I didn’t know fichier from dossier. I made a stack of flashcards for all the technical terms you encounter in the tutorial and crammed them. Thank you for saving my skin, Anki!
5. The “we” vs “they” rhetoric is pretty painful to read, isn’t it?
6. Or whatever your claim to fame is.

Your Django Story: Meet Jessamyn Smith

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Jessamyn Smith is an experienced full-stack software developer with over a decade in the field, primarily in back-end development for web applications. Her specialties are debugging, software design, refactoring legacy code, adding automated tests, and automating builds and deployments. She is a licensed professional engineer with a degree in Computer Engineering. She’s also Interim CTO at Ziversity.com, an organization that offers women, LGBTQ people, racial/ethnic minorities, Indigenous peoples, and persons with (dis)abilities a safe space to embrace their identity and add context to their experiences. Jessamyn is also a frequent mentor and occasional instructor at Ladies Learning Code.

How did your story with code start?

My first experience was Logo in elementary school and I didn’t like it at all. I found it very tedious, and when I found out there was a repeat command and I’d been drawing shapes by typing in the forward x left y commands I felt so betrayed I stopped doing the programming part of the library curriculum.

I found programing again quite by chance. I was depressed and working a low-paid dead-end job when I decided to start interviewing everyone I met about their jobs. I was at the Legion with my boyfriend at the time when I met an older gentleman whose job sounded amazing. He had a Ph.D. in Engineering and worked a couple days a week as a consultant in the oil patch, making great money. That started me researching engineering. This was the old days so I went down to Human Resources Canada and read through the binders about different jobs. I was surprised I hadn’t considered engineering before: as a practical person who liked math and science it seemed a natural fit. I’ve always wondered if the mass murder of women engineers at École Polytechnique de Montréal when I was just 13 frightened me off.

Originally I planned to be a Chemical Engineer, but a trip to a processing plant quickly dispelled that notion. I loved the first year programming class; finally, I could make the computer bend to my will! I took to programming quite naturally. I was so insecure at the time that if I hadn’t seen that I was better at programming than most of my classmates, I probably wouldn’t have tried to pursue it. My boyfriend went away one weekend and when he came back I’d made a Mastermind game in Turbo Pascal, learning to program by reading the help.

Interestingly, in second year I found some of my papers from Grade 7, and I’d written than when I grew up I wanted to be a “computer mechanic”. I suppose with my blue collar background I figured there had to be people who fixed computers, just as there were people who fixed cars. My interest was probably mostly due to the games Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail. Also, I was a very serious child, much concerned about the future, and already news articles were appearing about the burgeoning importance of computers.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was a short-order and prep cook for several years after high school. I’ve also worked as a farm labourer, market gardener, construction labourer, and babysitter.

What do you love the most about coding?

I love the power to create something from nothing, particularly when it’s something that makes people’s lives better. I am so committed to teaching programming because I want to put that power into everyone’s hands. I want to see what amazing tools people will create!

Why Django?

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and I love that with Django, most of the important basics are built-in, and most of the addons you can imagine have been created and open-sourced already. Django also has broadly sensible defaults and encourages you toward a good project structure while still being flexible. I find the Django community very friendly and welcoming, and that is important to me. I spend a lot of time in #django on IRC, helping when I can. I am continually impressed by the number of kind, intelligent people in the channel.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I just finished developing the initial release of Ziversity.com, an online platform to help connect diverse candidates with the companies who want them. I often hear from tech companies they want to hire more diverse people and don’t know where to find them, so I hope this will help.

I continue to be very happy about my work on codementor.io, where I teach people around the world about coding and good developing practices.

I am also proud to be a mentor and occasional instructor at Ladies Learning Code.

What are you most proud of?

It’s a few years old now, but I am still very proud of my talkbackbot. It has inspired so many people to engage with everyday sexism in a different way.

What are you curious about?

I am pretty curious about life in general. Right now, I am particularly interested to see what humanity is going to do with technology in the next 10 years. We face grave environmental challenges, and while it might already be too late, I still have hope that we can address those challenges.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I like to garden and walk my dogs. I also cook most of my own food, and I delight in doing it well. I still play video games from time to time, though not as much as I used to. These days I find I am spending a lot of spare time on my myriad open source projects, like a menstrual tracker and my various twitter bots, including @heartbotapp on twitter.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

I have many thoughts! I captured most of them pretty well on Twitter in a Codementor live chat. Check it out here.

Some of the things I share include:

Don’t be afraid to try things and experiment. You never know what you’ll learn!

Learn to write unit tests. You’ll save yourself so much time and mental strain. Your code will be better.

Learning to use a debugger is an excellent use of your time. You can go cli with pdb or visual with PyCharm.

Mostly I just wish I could give past me a big hug and tell her it’ll be okay, you’ll learn and life will be good.

Thanks Jessamyn! :)

If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), send an email to story@djangogirls.org!

Adrienne Lowe

@adriennefriend

Meet our new sponsor: Elastic!

One of the perks of being the Django Girls Awesomeness Ambassador is receiving cool emails. Some of these emails include those from future organizers really excited about their workshops, as well as from attendees and coaches who just want to say thank you. When we received an email from Elastic expressing interest in supporting the Django Girls mission, I was only starting the job and I have to say, I was as excited as our organizers: sponsorship for Django Girls and going to Munich to run a booth, count me in! I started to prepare a booth, think about what to say to people and what swag to bring with me. A few days before going to Munich, we received another email from Elastic saying they managed to raise almost 15,000 € for us. I went to Munich still not believing that all this money was for us! “Of course it is!”, said Livia, my contact from Elastic and she asked me what we planned to do with it.

I’m especially excited, because thanks to the Elastic sponsorship my future as a Awesomeness Ambassador is secured: currently, most of the money Django Girls Foundation receives covers my role in the organization. My job is to make the life of the support team easier so they can work on other projects: a programming book, cool videos for people who can’t attend our workshop, etc. My main job is to stay on top of the Django Girls inbox and make sure that anyone who asks for help will be answered swiftly with the necessary support, especially making sure everyone is happy and that planned events are happening as scheduled. I also help maintain our website and resources: our tutorial and its translations, documentations, posters and swag.

On top of securing the existence of the Awesomeness Ambassador position, we also plan to use this money on two cool initiatives. The first one is sending swag boxes to organizers full of stickers, buttons and tattoos - it will be our “Django Girls Organizer Starter Kit”. If you haven’t heard about us already, you have to look at pictures of our events: we want a positive learning atmosphere and all these little details contribute to it.

The second initiative is working on the inaugural Django Girls Summit! Yes, the Summit! We are extremely excited about this plan. We want to organize a two day unconference where organizers could meet and share their experiences about Django Girls workshops: what was hard, how they handled problems, how they find sponsors and so on and so on. We imagine it as a place where people who are making Django Girls what it is now could meet in person and learn from each other. We are really excited about this and can’t wait to start planning it!

Thank you again Elastic for the visibility you’ve gave to our organization, for the booth at Munich and for this awesome sponsorship. You have been with us from almost the very beginning, supporting us on many different levels: as mentors, supporters and sponsors. Thank you for being awesome!