Your Django Story: Meet Dori Czapari
This is a special post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. It is the first interview of a Django Girls alumni who works as a software developer now :) Read more about the interview series here.
Dori is a software developer at Allmyles in Budapest. She was an attendee of the first Django Girls workshop in Berlin, coached at Django Girls Amsterdam and organized Django Girls Budapest. When Dori isn’t writing awesome programs, travelling to conferences or workshops or working on cool new Django Girls projects she likes to fire juggle, take dance classes, hang out at the hackerspace in Budapest, eat good food or spend hours reading either books or code. You can follow her on Twitter @doriczapari.
How did your story with code start?
At a family holiday. I just graduated from Psychology and I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself, because I haven’t found a Master’s degree I wanted to apply for. My mom had enough of my whining and sat down with that horribly thick catalogue of all the universities and courses and made a long list of those I could apply for with my diplomas. That’s how I discovered Digital Humanities, and I started to think - I want to stay connected to humanities but the traditional career paths didn’t appeal to me at all. I was never afraid of computers (in fact, when I was a little girl, back in the DOS days, I could find my way so well around the system that my parents always said I’m gonna be a programmer :)) But I forgot about this for a long time because in high school I decided I like literature and languages, and scientific subjects are no concern of mine. Boy, was I wrong.
I started reading and researching about Digital Humanities and the idea grew on me more and more. I decided I’m going to apply next semester, but I still had a lot of time on my hands - I only had a Philosophy thesis to write, no more classes, and I was working part time. I wanted to see what programming is like, to be in a better position when I apply. Almost by accident, I got a great tip from one of my friends who is also a self-taught programmer and around that time he was already working at the most famous Hungarian startup. He said I should take the online course he started with - a beginner Python course at Udacity.com, and it was a well-needed kick in the butt. Before I knew it I was regularly spending three consecutive days in sweatpants, working on course exercises all day long, running around and shouting with joy when I managed to solve some silly problem.
This kind of analytical, dissecting problem-solving thinking necessary for even the simplest programming tasks was something I left behind when I graduated from high-school, because this is something you almost never use if you study humanities. It was totally unfamiliar when I started this course so it took quite some time to accommodate myself to it, but I realized I missed it a lot. It was very reassuring to deal with problems that have a clear solution, with a straightforward path to them. In humanities I always faced a certain elusiveness I wasn’t comfortable with. With computational problems it’s very different.
Anyway, as I’d decided early on that I hate math and I’m just not gonna care (oh hey teenage years) I have a lot to make up for. But this also means everything is so new and exciting now :)
After some time I had to bow to the fact that coding is the most fun thing I’ve ever done and I decided I’m not going back to university just yet. Instead I’m gonna focus my time on getting better at coding and I’ll somehow try to make a career out of it. So I kept my part time job, took some other courses online and eventually landed a Django Girls workshop spot which accelerated everything by 500%…
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was a Philosophy and Psychology major, and I also studied Spanish, Latin and Greek. I considered myself a truly liberal arts kind of person, but I absolutely hated writing essays. Instead, I was good at things that require strict systematic thinking - like formal logic (I was the best in class!) and dead languages with ridiculously many, carefully applied grammatical rules. I had several career plans, like staying in academia as a philosophy & latin professor, becoming a therapist specialized in this very marginal intersection of philosophy and psychology called philosophical praxis or working at a foster home. All of these turned out to be either not entirely suitable for me or lacking actual perspective.
What do you love the most about coding?
Apart from the thing I mentioned about my relationship with computational thinking, I think knowing how to interact with computers is very, very cool :) Also, I love that I can make things that work, from scratch, in a relatively short time. That problems have solutions and there’s a clear way to them. That everything has an answer and I already have a lot of practice in looking for them. This experience shaped my whole mindset in general. I love that there’s always something new to learn. I love the feeling I get when something finally clicks and starts working, the excitement hasn’t faded a bit since the first days.
But what I love the most is the people I got to meet because of coding :)
How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?
Before Django Girls I was completely on my own – I’ve been learning programming for more than half a year by the time I got accepted so it changed pretty much everything. Getting in was such a huge thing for me, I remember when I got the acceptance email I couldn’t stop jumping and crying for half an hour. I can say with confidence that the week at EuroPython was one of the greatest weeks of my life – so many new impressions, nice people, first time in Berlin, finally I can talk to people about programming - what else do I need? :)
When I came home I was so overwhelmed and inspired I quit my part time receptionist job right away. This was a reckless move, and could have turned out so bad, but I was thinking if I’m lucky and hardworking, I could get myself an internship soon, and if not, even being a babysitter is better than that absolutely demotivating job. I started to work on organizing Django Girls Budapest, and I met more and more local Python people.
I don’t know how I had the courage to do it because I’m totally not the public speaker type, but I gave a talk at the local Python meetup about my journey in programming, and Django Girls. This was my first meetup ever. The only person I knew from EuroPython wasn’t there, so I didn’t know anyone in the audience, by the way they were all men, professionals of the field I just took my first steps at – it was so incredibly intimidating, but I did it!
After the talk someone came to me and asked if I was looking for a job. Of course I was! (Okay, I haven’t actively started looking yet, I kept postponing writing a CV.) So we agreed on an interview next week and then I got hired!!! The people I’m working with are incredibly awesome and the work itself is a huge challenge everyday but also super exciting! I love it so much, it’s the best thing that could have happened to me. (And it happened partly because of Django Girls so I’m very grateful!) I still have a hard time believing I’m an actual programmer. Okay, I still have a hard time believing I know what a Python dictionary or a web framework is :) It wasn’t so long ago when I had zero idea about anything computer-related after all.
I’m level 3 at Django Girls, meaning I was an attendee, a coach and an organizer :) With each role I got to have different insights about what all this means - what’s it like being part of a great community, how to teach complete beginners (and how far, surprisingly, I am from their level, so my explanations are less clear than I expected) and what’s it like living off of a to-do list for months to get every little detail come together and be very proud in the end when something awesome happens :)
All in all, Django Girls made me more confident in myself and in that I can make things people are interested in, it taught me I don’t have to be a superhero to change people’s lives, it’s sufficient if I love something enough to want to make others love it too :)
Why Django?
Because of Django Girls! I didn’t know much about frameworks before the workshop, and I’m still very much a beginner in it, so I can’t compare it to anything else. But for all I know, the Django community is awesome, and I’d want to be part of it even if Django sucked. :D
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Coding-wise, I have many project plans but I haven’t found the time yet to start them, my life has turned upside down in the past few weeks with this new job and Django Girls. But I’ve just become a member of the local hackerspace so I think that will be the perfect place to finally make something. Those people are unbelievable – a few weeks ago the water pipe broke in the basement and they made a construction of a bucket, some measuring tool and a Spark, wrote a program to monitor the water level in the bucket and put it on the web. Incredibly cool!
Other plans include keeping Django Girls Budapest alive, making a second event a few months from now and coaching at other DG workshops!
What are you the most proud of?
I don’t want to sound pompous but I’m very very proud of what I achieved in this past year. I would never have expected myself to sit down everyday to learn something I don’t even know if I’m good at without any human feedback at all. And there were situations where I had to push myself quite a bit, like when I gave the talk at the meetup, or when I had to be super organized when preparing for the Budapest workshop (which is very different from my usual, messy ways), but in the end all these were very rewarding and give me a reason to be proud :) Besides this, I’m very proud of all the girls who came to learn coding with us at the workshop, and if there’s anyone who got enough motivation to continue coding, it makes me incredibly happy and feel it was worth all of it.
What are you curious about?
Ever since I started coding I’m saying pretty much everything! Things that made me shiver or roll my eyes before, like algorithms, became my favorite topics to read about. I’d really like to brush up on my math skills, now that I’m out of high school I assume I would enjoy it a lot :) And I’m eager to learn about anything computers-related. Something specific I’d like to know more about right now is Raspberry Pi. We have one at the office but I never get around to play with it. Before coding, I was most curious about very old languages, like Latin, Greek and Hebrew, because even the most simple words have multiple layers of meaning, and this is wonderful. I’m really interested in languages in general, etymology and stuff. I hope to find some time for learning something new soon.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I’m a fire juggler, and our team is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year! Other than this I have pretty usual hobbies: music (I used to make music too when I was in high school, I should start over!), films, books, cooking, EATING, dance (I go to contemporary ballet classes). But it was so long ago I had any free time at all I almost don’t remember what it feels like :)
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Talk to everyone about what you do. I found that people are incredibly helpful in general and you can learn about so many awesome things in programming this way. That I started using Linux, learned about text editors (always wondered what the colorful text in the black box is in the videos) or know the best terminal commands are all consequences of talking to new acquaintances about that I just started programming.
Never be discouraged because you feel stupid or something doesn’t work out right away (or for the 1000th try). It’s normal. It’s the first step to learning something! And if you don’t know something, never be afraid to ask questions! Don’t try to make a better impression by not revealing you don’t know it! Seriously, don’t :)
Thank you so much Dori! <3
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Your Django Story: Meet Kathleen Tuite
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Kathleen is a builder of systems involving collaborative creativity, crowdsourcing, and/or computer vision. She makes awesome things out of computers and the internet.
How did your story with code start?
When I was 10, my mom (an electrical engineer) got me a Geocities account and handed me a book on HTML. I made a website where people could “adopt” cats that I had drawn. In high school, college, and grad school, I took classes in computer science and math. The more I learned, the more I was able to accomplish.
I was thinking about this when I wrote “My Nerd Story” (http://kaflurbaleen.blogspot.com/2014/02/my-nerd-story.html) a while ago. When I was a teen, I was pretty into punk rock and the DIY culture that went with it. I screenprinted my own t-shirts, made my own wallet out of duct tape, put pyramid studs and safety pins on everything, went to local shows, watched from up close as my friends composed and performed their music. This has absolutely affected my relationship with code – I reject that I am merely a “consumer” of other peoples’ apps; I need to be able to create technology myself, view the source code and see how something works, and share what I’ve made with others. I must help others create and express themselves.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I guess was a kid before I was a programmer. I played with teddy bears and built forts. I sewed clothes for my teddy bears and crafted duct tape wallets and screenprinted shirts with pirate penguins on them.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love that learning about coding feels (perhaps is) exponential in its rewards. As I gain more skills and better command of my tools, I’m able to learn new things more easily and to tackle more creative and advanced projects. The more I learn and the more I practice my *craft* of programming, the greater impact I can potentially have on the world.
Why Django?
I was using PHP before, and it was a nightmare. My mom mentioned Django because she was learning it, so I installed it and started poking around. I went to a Startup Weekend where I worked on a team with someone who walked me through the basics (Django is kind of complicated). I had a twitter friend who was teaching herself Django to start her own wedding planning company, which I actually used for my wedding!
Jessica McKellar said (on this blog): “95% of the time, what I need is a database-backed website with administrator support, and Django lets me get up and running in just a few hours.” and this is totally the reason I use it, too.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m pretty much done with the website for #FeministHackerBarbie. I could imagine adding more features, but at this point, the meme lives on within the internet itself. People only need my site to create images easily, and they can (and are) posting and hosting them elsewhere!
I’m currently working on a personal project that has been gnawing at me for years. It’s not ready yet! But I’m also using Django for part of it.
What are you the most proud of?
I’m proud of all of the ecosystems that I’ve built that have allowed people contribute in a way that adds up. I have been surprised and amazed so many times at what people have drawn or composed or built through projects like my collaborative sketching application Sketch-a-bit, the Feminist Hacker Barbie website, and my 3D photography reconstruction game PhotoCity.
What are you curious about?
I’m curious about what drives people and leads to a fulfilling life. Making/creating/sharing *feels* really important to me. How can I help unlock the creative potential of other people?
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
Browsing the internet is probably my main hobby. I currently live in the Santa Cruz mountains, so I have excellent access to beautiful hiking locations! I also like to eat, cook, take photos, read, and of course… program stuff.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Share what you learn! There is probably someone out there on the internet who is at the same level as you, who is currently stuck on the same thing you just got yourself unstuck on. So take some time to write/blog/tweet about your learning process. It’ll help you to reflect on it as well!
I blog about my approaches to certain tricky problems. People have thanked me for providing the answer they were in desperate need of.
I’ve even blogged about things that didn’t work, and have had people help me figure out why something was broken.
Find a buddy or a mentor. (Or offer your services as a mentor if you are not a beginner.) As a beginner, you will get stuck. You may be able to get unstuck on your own (and I prided myself on this a lot when I was in high school and college) but it can be so much faster and less frustrating to have someone else unstick you.
There are some simple things about debugging to keep in mind. Someone has probably blogged about them in depth on the internet, but here are 2 little points:
Read the error message! It will hopefully give you a major clue as to where your bug is.
If something is broken, don’t try to change a bunch of things at once. Work incrementally until you solve it, so you know exactly what was broken and how you fixed it.
Thanks Kathleen! :)
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Your Django Story: Meet Susan Tan
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Susan is a software engineer at Piston, a cloud computing startup located in San Francisco. She likes to use Python-based web frameworks. Prior to Piston, she was a web applications engineer at Flixster with Rotten Tomatoes. She’s a core committer of a Django-based web application project at www.openhatch.org. Previously, she’s dabbled in fixing some bugs in Django and in the IPython notebook. She gives talks at various technology conferences such as PyCon. Susan loves to drink warm cups of oolong tea at grand elegant tea houses while reviewing pull requests.
How did your story with code start?
I learned how to code in my freshman year of college (Harvey Mudd College). Every incoming student, regardless of their intended major, had to take an intensive CS class. The coursework was taught in Python, a language that most beginners can grasp without being burdened by the syntax. The class assumed zero knowledge of programming principles and proceeded at a fast and challengingly fun pace. The first programming assignment of the first week was to program a robot to traverse a maze of any size and of any complexity, for example. The class covered a good introductory broad overview of the practical aspects of CS: control loops, recursion, object-oriented programming, functional programming, good UX design, to finite state machines and assembly language. I really liked that the class was structured with lots of short exercises and creative lab assignments that encouraged collaboration between students. Much of the post-2010 CS curriculum at Mudd has been covered in mainstream press releases such as here.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was a college student. I was very briefly an electrical engineer, working on a summer internship that involved Arduinos and motors at Beckman Coulter, a gigantic multi-national biomedical diagnostics company headquartered in Southern California. In the first week of my internship, I realized that I hated being in large tech companies that have greater than 500 employees, which is ironically, the only type of place where electrical engineers can be found. So, after I finished my summer internship in Southern California, I travelled to San Francisco, where I attended a 10-week fast-paced all-women development bootcamp, and afterwards, I started my first software job at a well-known movie tech company. I ended up staying and living in San Francisco, where I currently work as a software engineer at a cloud computing startup of less than 100 employees.
What do you love the most about coding?
Elegance and collaboration. There is always more than one way to code a solution and there is always a more elegant or more simpler solution in any set of given product requirements. I like the process of refining a prototype to the point where a large mess of 500 lines of code can be refactored or simplified down to ten readable lines. The process of refactoring is almost always collaborative. Working with the brightest minds who review my code and offer feedback in code review is the most fun intellectual experience for any software engineer looking to improve.
Why Django?
Because engineers are lazy and do like the convenience of using Django, its pre-built necessary extensions such as auth and admin, a Python framework that is easy to learn, is well-documented, and has been tried and proven in thousands of web sites.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’ve been working on improving the test infrastructure behind the codebase of www.openhatch.org, a Django web application. As a core committer on this Python web application project, I’ve also been reviewing other people’s pull requests submitted to Open Hatch on Github and helping them improve. I also plan to do more infrastructure-level tasks on Open Hatch, such as a Django upgrade or performance optimizations.
What are you the most proud of?
I am proud of my collection of configurations files: vim config, bash config, and git config files, which make programming a ton more convenient and easier. I use a lot of git aliases. I like to configure every command-line tool that I use to make me more productive.
What are you curious about?
I am curious about the different types of tea and methods of brewing tea.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I love to drink warm cups of oolong tea at grand elegant tea houses while reviewing pull requests or reading a book. I am occasionally visiting tea stores in Chinatown or in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, trying out a cup of new oolong tea.
I am also a dedicated amateur ballet dancer who takes classes and spectates local professional-level ballet performances in San Francisco.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Surround yourself with other programmers, particularly those in the open source community. Join an open source project that you love and admire and start to contribute to a project. You’ll learn a great deal of software best practices and meet lots of new smart people in FOSS projects. One good way to start is to look at the directory of FOSS projects on www.openhatch.org and contact #openhatch on freenode if you have questions.
Thanks Susan! :)
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Your Django Story: Meet Sabine Schmaltz
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Sabine is working on a website for people who sew their own clothes at https://kaava.net/en/. Before that, she was a post doc at Saarland University.
How did your story with code start?
I was one of the few girls of my generation who were exposed to computers from an early age on. I used to play “packing my bags” with my father’s Windows 3.11 folders - he was not so amused when found that I had neatly put everything into a single folder. Before I could read I had formatted a hard disk (thanks to one of these convenient auto-menu thingies for DOS that were popular back then).
I remember that I got my first own PC (IBM 286) before I went to school. Soon, me and my brother were figuring out QBASIC. In elementary school, me and a classmate were coding a story in form of an ASCII video in QBASIC. We were simply using PRINT statements to render the scenes and PLAY statements for the music. It was really more a creative endeavor than a coding one. :)
Coding has followed me through all my childhood. I was one of these kids who started lots of things and had lots of little projects - but I couldn’t finish anything I could be proud of. I tinkered with BASIC, Pascal, Visual Basic and Visual C++.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
For a long time during my youth I believed I wanted to become a starving artist - the kind of artist that hangs out at DeviantArt.com and creates marvelous digital paintings that everyone else drools over. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I lacked the patience to acquire the level of skill I wanted to have. Honestly, I was really pretty bad - I might have had a bit of talent with colors, but I was horrible with shapes. No art school would have taken me in.
Then I went to University to study Computer Science. My back-then-boyfriend-now-husband did a great job at making sure I complete all the exercise sheets and projects. I found that it was a lot of fun to do them, actually, and that I was able to get good grades. I actually ended up doing a PhD which was very interesting and also very helpful in teaching me to stick to something long enough.
Early this year, I found that I didn’t want to continue in academia - I really lack the passion, both for teaching and for publishing. If I made it to professorship it would have been a long hard road. With that came the realization that there are so many things I could be doing instead: In April, I started working on my own website, while learning Django, web development, and Python from scratch.
What do you love the most about coding?
In the computer games I played, my favorite choice was always the wizard, the sorceress or anything that came close to it. I think, what comes closest to magic in this real world we have here is coding. You enter some more or less arcane symbols into a device and make it do useful things, that’s pretty neat, really. It feels a lot like creating something from nothing - even though, in reality, we’re just rearranging things that exist in a way that they become useful. With the abundance of good open source libraries available, it’s really more like putting someone else’s effort to a good use by incorporating it into something that does something for people.
The other thing I love about coding is really that you can work wherever (and it doesn’t matter if a baby is sleeping on your lap). There are so many professions where that just plain wouldn’t work.
Why Django?
In March, I researched possible choices for web development, and there were three things that would crop up again and again: PHP, Django and Rails. I knew I didn’t want to step down into the PHP-pits (I had done a bit of PHP hacking on our chair’s website and I knew enough people who hate PHP), and I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel by starting with some micro-micro-framework-thingy so that left Rails and Django. I read a few tutorials on either and found that I feel more at home with the Pythonic way of making things explicit. So, I started with Django and working with it has taught me a lot about web development - and I’m still learning.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m building a website where you link your sewing projects to the patterns you used and where you can record what kind of fabric you used. So, it’s basically a big database with a faceted search interface. A main point is that people can share experiences with patterns and fabrics. It’s also a social site with forums - I’m not sure I like these modern drive-by social sites where it’s hard to get in contact with people. I think I prefer a place that makes it simple to have meaningful conversations.
What are you the most proud of?
That I’ve been working on this project consistently since April. 10 years back I wouldn’t have managed to stick to working on one thing for so long.
What are you curious about?
Pretty much everything. I like thinking. I’m now particularly interested in how to make things that people can use without being annoyed and in learning enough web design to get by - I know I’m not there yet, but I know how it makes all the difference in the world when a site doesn’t annoy you all the time with weird unexpected stuff happening.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I like to read things on the internet (mostly about programming and sewing nowadays) and I have a toddler who is starting to talk. Actually, I currently don’t seem to have many hobbies unless I count everything related to the website. Back in the days, I used to play computer games a lot (Railroad Tycoon, Monkey Island, lots and lots of RPG-style games, Diablo/Diablo2, and countless others) - and I really mean a lot.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Basically, it has never been easier to get something to run than today. Between stackoverflow and all the great tutorials and open source libraries, there is two main things that are useful in order to learn:
self-confidence, and
persistence
Basically,
you just need to make sure you don’t take it personal when things don’t work right away, this is normal when you start doing something new
you need to keep searching and asking questions until you’ve got the problem figured out
That’s all. Start by doing tutorials and proceed by working on your own project. For most of the challenges you face there will be a good blog post or a stackoverflow.com question out there that you can read.
If you want to build something really involved, solid foundations are very helpful. Get together with like-minded people and study free lectures provided by Khan Academy.
Thanks Sabine! :)
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Your Django Story: Meet Danielle Madeley
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Danielle is a senior software engineer and architect at Infoxchange, an Australian technology not for profit working to reduce the digital divide. In her spare time she’s a bike mechanic, musician and political activist.
How did your story with code start?
My Dad taught me the basics of programming when I was quite young. Which would have been around the time the World Wide Web and the Linux kernel were being written. I started writing little games that were either too linear or too stochastic to be enjoyable.When the WWW came to Australia I put together a webpage full of under-construction gifs. Around 15 I was teaching myself Linux and Python and I learned how to write CGI scripts. I was probably the only 15 year old in the neighbourhood whose house had an Apache server running something they’d written.
I went to university to study engineering and computer science. I got involved with open source, mostly in the GNOME project. This landed me my first 2 jobs. I then became increasingly interested in using my skills to help people directly which took me to foreign aid and ultimately to Infoxchange, a technology not-for-profit working to improve digital inclusion and help other not-for-profits harness technology.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
Probably colouring in?
What do you love the most about coding?
Coding is a tool to create software. It’s a bit like asking why do you love hammers? What I love is creating. I love seeing a thing come to life and having people use it.
Why Django?
I was working as a scientific programmer and we needed an application for our intranet to help manage the hardcopy data (on tape). All of our applications to date had been Perl CGI done the hard way. Django had just been released and seemed like a natural choice for someone who enjoyed Python. I had the app together within a week.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
In my spare time I’m working on a prototype of a new platform for progressive political organising built on Django and Elasticsearch.
What are you the most proud of?
The thing I’m most proud of is my most recent product at my job for Infoxchange. We rebuilt our aging community service directory into a modern, smart, web 2.0 search engine using Django and Elasticsearch. For the first time it has an API that allows us and other organisations access the data with all of the smart searching features. It was by far one of the most complex pieces of software I’ve ever worked on and required reading a significant amount of academic literature in the field of information retrieval. As well as solving some purely engineering problems like importing and indexing all of the data from the old database.
What are you curious about?
About using technology to help people. In all senses, not just software. I’m also intrigued by hidden relationships the data we know but don’t know that we know.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I volunteer as a bike mechanic. I’m also volunteering for the Greens party in the lead up to our upcoming state election. I’m trying to start a new band.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Get involved in open source. Not just using, but contributing. I learned more from writing open source through code reviews and technical discussions than I did in six years of uni. Because of open source I began my first job with a better understanding of revision control, architecture and code quality than many people already there.
Thanks Danielle! :)
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Your Django Story: Meet Maria Niţă
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Maria is a proud Romanian girl, passionate about numbers, letters, teaching and Open Source. Ping her @ http://marianitadn.github.io.
How did your story with code start?
In 3rd grade my school manager (who was my dad’s best friend) bought a few computers, and taught a lab for a few of us on the weekends. After playing Mario on my mom’s work computer, shutting down and clicking on folders was pretty amazing. I was the only girl. I wrote my first lines of code in high school, in Turbo Pascal. It may not been fancy, but it was enough for me to start coding. So, 9 years later I was graduating a Software Engineering Master’s.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
In a way I was teaching. I studied Math and Computer Science at university, and I was teaching Math. When I had to pick my master program I had to choose: become a Math teacher or a Software Engineer? I picked the second one, but with a twist.
What do you love the most about coding?
Note to reader: I answered this question last. So many things. I can’t say what in one sentence, and I can’t find a reason not to. I think it’s true love.
I had to answer during a workshop what I will do if I would win the lottery. I answered: I would code & teach to help others, and travel the world during this time. They said that if you would do the same thing as your full time job is, then you’re doing what you’re passionate about.
Why Django?
I got a cool job at a Romanian start-up, and they were coding in Python and used Django as their web framework. So, it was time to learn Python and Django. I would have learnt anyway, but I was lucky enough to do this as a full time job.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Outside work I’ve been working at a Ruby gem called Foregit, related with my internship at the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. My boyfriend and I are working at a cool web app, which will merge two of our dear projects - a lot of Go. Because I like to teach, I’m a mentor in the “Learn IT, Girl” program and I hope to organize a Django Girls event soon.
What are you the most proud of?
I’m proud of finding the courage to leave my life doing things I’m passionate about, learning from my mistakes and overcome my fears. At least 360 days per year.
What are you curious about?
What’s not there to be curious about? OK, perhaps not about Justin Bieber’s latest song, but else…
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I travel, if I don’t code or mentor a workshop. I would like to make more time for yoga and sewing.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Start. Don’t be afraid to jump into something, none of us knew anything at the beginning. Most of us still learn (hopefully).
Ask for help. Find a program or someone to help you. But, you should realize that most of the work has to be done by you.
And for all of us out there: do things with passion. It’s a very much used phrase but really think of what it means for you.
Thanks Maria! :)
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Your Django Story: Meet Patrycja Szabłowska
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Patrycja is a Python developer who previously worked with Java. She is open minded and eager to learn about the next Python library or framework. Patrycja works at Grupa Wirtualna Polska and currently lives in the Warsaw area in Poland with her husband Wacław.
How did your story with code start?
It’s hard for me to tell when this actually started. Computers and technology were in my life as long as I can remember. My dad works in IT, but he’s a computer networks and electrical circuits specialist and he’s never been into programming.
I was about 12 years old, when I heard about extra IT classes at my school, so I decided – I’m definitely going. That’s when I learned the basics of HTML and when I first saw the internet.
Later on, at middle school and also at high school I had information technology classes with an awesome teacher. I had classes with her for 4 years in total and I owe her much. She was well educated in computer science and the IT class with her was involving. She wanted us to do advanced tasks with MS Excel, she showed us two programming languages - Logo and Pascal. I remember even her showing us some UML diagrams.
Around that time I had to pick a faculty for the rest of high school. I chose the math-physics one – with much hesitance, because it was considered the hardest one and at least two people had told me that I won’t make it, because my mind “isn’t scientific enough”.
But my mom told me - “You can choose whatever you want and be good at that”. So I did.
I went to university to study computer science. I discovered Java, which was the first programming language I really enjoyed. Then I took Python classes and I didn’t want to program in Java anymore ;).
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
After high school I studied computer science, so I’ve never done any other job.
What do you love the most about coding?
It gives us almost infinite power to bring ideas to life with just a few commands. You don’t need specialist equipment. Just a computer and the internet to google the problems.
Why Django?
I learned about Django 4 years ago and I really love the ORM and the admin. The other thing I like about it Django is the idea of having the logic separated. Everything has its own place – the templates, the views, the urls. I was already in love with Python and Django was the next great thing I discovered
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m not doing any Django projects at the moment – I’m consumed by pure Python projects this year. I’ve been also learning a new language recently – Go, which is a nice alternative to Python for me. I’m a technical reviewer of a book about design patterns in Python. I was a coach at Django Girls Warsaw, which was awesome. I’m having much fun working with my colleagues at Grupa Wirtualna Polska.
What are you the most proud of?
I’m proud of the fact that despite all the difficulties along the way I managed to become a programmer. It wasn’t easy, I’m from a small town and getting past the first year of my studies was quite a pain. Even my friend had told me that I should accept the fact that I won’t pass my exams and that computer science isn’t meant for me.
Somehow I managed to push my life in the direction I want and I’m also thankful to my family and husband, who believed in me no matter what.
What are you curious about?
The world :). In general, improving myself in many ways. When it comes to IT – knowing how to become a better programmer or what new libraries I can use. How to write code which is more efficient, easier to maintain. Getting closer to the community helps a lot in self-improvement – you can learn about many technologies which you haven’t heard of.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
It varies :). As I said I’m curious about many things, but I’m also a little lazy. I’m definitely a bookworm – my favorite books are Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Witcher, Jeżycjada. Other things I do (but not on regular basis) include cooking, baking, playing guitar, practicing yoga, exploring WWII history. I’m also a crazy cat lady with two cats.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
You’ll be discouraged many times. Don’t give up. Nobody has become a programmer over night. Pick an objective and stick to it. Attend local meetups related to your field – it’ll help you grow and you’ll meet interesting people.
Thanks Patrycja! :)
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Your Django Story: Meet Erika Pogorelc
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Through hard work and a little bit of fairy dust, Erika transformed from hairdresser to righteous developer. She reports from Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she is active in her local learning communitiy which teaches girls about coding and how to do it.
How did your story with code start?
It started out at the Faculty for Information and Computer Science here in Ljubljana. It was the first place that I encountered my first for loop. It was mind boggling in all honesty. At that time I remember thinking to myself: “What the @#$! I got myself into? What the @#$! is a for loop anyway, and why did I wanted to be here at all?”. All the way through the university I had been working super hard, trying to take additional classes or join study groups. This was before online learning courses that one can take nowadays. So my student years were not all party all the time, because I have been studying and devoting my time to it very religiously. The best thing about it is that I didn’t even mind it, I loved to learn about code and algorithms and the rest. I know, it is a first symptom of a geek in the making, and boy did I have it.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
Ah, I am a person of many interests, but I did start out at a hairdressing school. I worked in hairdressing salons in Ljubljana for just a little while, just to get the hang of things and I managed to keep all the ears attached to the heads that I was cutting hair on. I moved on to try myself out in sales, but it turns out that I couldn’t sell a bucket of water to a bloke in burning trousers. Not to mention that I hated it. I had also spend some time working social spheres and worked on a project that helped young addicts to get reintegrated back to society which was the last step of their rehab program. We were writing CVs and learn things for school with the ones that went back to school. I was always trying to encourage them to adopt the mindset of “I want to do _______(fill in the blank with what you wish to do in life), and I am ready to work hard to get there”. So I had decided to practice what I preach, and enrolled at the university at my tender age of 27. Of course i couldn’t just transit from hairdressing school to university, so i had to finish two more schools before that, which gave me the study habits that I needed for the university.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love the mind challenges that it gives me. Trough time of course they get more complicated and demanding, which is OK, because in this way I can see my progress and ability of solving problems with code. A few more years and I will get over the imposter syndrome :). And also, there is a nice side effect of being a programmer, now I have many very interesting friends to which I can speak about all sorts of things. It turns out that very rarely developers have only one interest - development. In fact almost everyone has at least one but usually more hobbies, like cycling, diving, dancing, playing instruments,… So there is always a lot to talk about when we don’t talk about development.
Why Django?
I have encountered with Django more or less by accident. The company I had been employed by at the beginning of my career was using Django for their projects. In retrospective I do have to say that this was a wise decision on their part, because Django is just simply awesome and it was very suitable for their project. Python is the type of language that is quite easy to learn, I should know, I was working with java and PHP before. Django has a very great balance between offering built-in functionalities and giving the ability of figuring out best configuration for your project. In short, it does make you think a bit about which parts and how to use it. I like that, because automagic frightens me sometimes and it gives me the feeling that I am cheating, that am not really doing enough.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
A good portion of the year, I was working on a project Codeweek EU, which is actually built with Django. I am one of the developers that developed this open source application and enable people to be a part of codeweek EU initiative, helping us spread the knowledge about software development. This project is something special for me as it was built through a local coding group with a lot of help from people who are just learning their first for loops.
What are you the most proud of?
The fact that I am still sticking to it and the way it looks I am going to be sticking with it for a very long time. Software development is my passion. I know this now.
What are you curious about?
I am curious about everything. Even cooking…
I like to fill my head with weird facts. For example, did you know: The largest snowflake ever recorded reportedly measured 38 centimeters across?
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
Sometimes I hike, I almost bought a bike this summer and I really like to perform badly at a karaoke party singing one of the goldies from the eighties. Yeah, I rickroll people sometimes.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
First dip your toes and then submerge! Don’t be afraid of people telling you that something is hard, because you know you can handle it. It’s mind boggling but it is just as much fun.
Thanks Erika! :)
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16Django Girls Kraków, 11th November 2014
Only three days after awesome Django Girls Warsaw next Django Girls event took place. This time in Kraków, Poland.
43 amazing women and 15 fantastic coaches met in Hub:raum to dive into Django.
A day before, on Monday, everybody met at 6:00 p.m. for Installation Party. Even though the time was limited, everybody had everything installed very quickly and most of the groups started Python chapter immediately, because they were so eager to learn!
On Tuesday we met in Hub:raum again, had a tasty breakfast around 8:30 a.m. and after a welcome talk, the fun part began!
Although we were worried that the tutorial is too long, it turned out that two hours after lunch, many groups were almost done with a tutorial! It was amazing! In next hours most of people finished tutorial, managed to do all tutorial extensions and still had time for a coffee, tasty cupcakes or a hot chocolate!
I even merged a pull request to the tutorial from one of the attendees, because she made some tutorial fixes! It was awesome!
We were overwhelmed by how motivated and focused everybody was! And how much they enjoyed learning how to build a website from scratch!
Around 7:30 p.m. we officially closed the workshop and at 8:00 p.m. Pykonik - Kraków Python User Group - began.
Django Girls Kraków wouldn’t be possible without many, many people who helped us make it wonderful. We want to say thank you to all our awesome sponsors: Python Software Foundation, Divio, GitHub, MegiTeam, Deployed, i2aSolutions and Simply User. Special thanks for Hub:raum for hosting the event in their wonderful space! We also want to say big thank you to all our coaches, who did amazing job! Thank you Krzysiek, Batistek, Tomek, Ania, Loïc, Bartek, Leszek, Sebastian, Grzesiek, Michał, Wiktor, Justyna, Ania, Rodolfo, Mattia and Tim!
Big thank you for Michał for a lot of help with decorations and organizing the space. Without you we would be lost! We’d love to thank Lidka and Bartek too, for making wonderful photos!
And big thank you for Marysia for co-organizing the event with me! You did a great job and thanks to you Django Girls Kraków was amazing!
Last, but not at least, big thank you for all **our attendees **, who made the day unforgettable! You gave us motivation to continue the work we do! Thank you!
Your Django Story: Meet Jessica McKellar
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Jessica is a startup founder, software engineer, and open source developer living in San Francisco, California. She enjoys the Internet, networking, low-level systems engineering, relational databases, tinkering on electronics projects, and contributing to and helping other people contribute to open source software. Jessica spends a lot of time volunteering, engaging technologists about education, and empowering effective people and initiatives in her capacity as a Director for the Python Software Foundation.
How did your story with code start? What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I always liked computers (there’s a famous family photo of me at age 2, holding a bottle in 1 hand and playing on an Apple IIci with the other). I took an introductory programming class in high school, but I have to admit that it didn’t really click with me – I didn’t have any friends who were into programming, and I was much more into the sciences; I was a Science Olympiad nerd, and I declared Chemistry as my first major in university.
While pursuing a Chemistry degree at MIT, many of my friends were pursuing Computer Science degrees. I liked Chemistry, but I was intrigued by the observation that my CS friends seemed to be learning a toolkit of tools for solving countless interdisciplinary problems in the world. That was powerful, and I wanted to see if I could do it too. I signed up for a few CS classes, loved them, and ended up getting bachelors and masters degrees in Computer Science.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love the ability it gives me to effect changes I want to see in the world. We can write software that makes people’s lives better, that connects people, that empowers people with data.
Why Django?
95% of the time, what I need is a database-backed website with administrator support, and Django lets me get up and running in just a few hours. It is batteries-included in the ways I most need it to be, just like Python.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Recently, I’ve been prepping for a couple of PyCon talks and going through Capture the Flag challenges.
I’m grateful that I’ve been able to speak at PyCons around the world, which is a chance to meet and learn from the local Python and open source communities.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I spend a lot of my free time reading and writing. I’m also a Director for the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and co-chair of the PSF’s Outreach and Education Committee.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Everyone can become a good programmer. It takes time and practice to become fluent, just like with a foreign language, but you’ll get there!
Once you know the language basics, most people find that the best way to get better quickly is to practice through projects that they actually care about. Pick a project, and see what completing that project forces you to learn.
Thanks Jessica! :)
