Your Django Story: Meet Ola Sitarska
This is the first post of our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Ola is one of the founders of Django Girls and also the co-founder of Issue Stand. She is 22 years old and lives in Warsaw, Poland.
How did your story with code start?
As a 13-year old girl I was spending a lot of my free time in front of the computer, playing some games online. I really liked one particular game that I was playing for a year in which I was also a chat moderator. All moderators really wanted to have more tools to manage the chat and banned users… so as a 14-year old girl I thought: how hard can it be? And I started googling. It was a really long journey, but a year later I created my first website in PHP. I fell in love with the feeling of working on something that was really difficult for a long time and it finally WORKED. Really empowering.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was just a kid that liked to make things.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love the fact that I can be independent. I can think of some idea and I can build it. This is the most empowering thing ever.
It also gave me an opportunity to meet fantastic people in our community and make some great friends.
Programming skills allowed me to support my family at a very young age, leave my small town, study and live in the capital of Poland, which I couldn’t otherwise do.
Programming changed my whole life.
Why Django?
This is actually a funny story: before I met Django I was a PHP developer. I spent a half of my time writing management tools for the websites I created, so other people could modify the content without knowing how to program. I suddenly learned that Django is this thing that does it automatically (twice more time to build websites!) and in addition you don’t have to worry too much about security (again more time to build awesome websites!). So you could say that I actually changed the language I was programming in because of auto generated admin :)
I fell in love with Django from the very first day and never looked back.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I am currently in the process of changing my daily job, so I can’t talk about my work projects yet :)
Most of my time is now dedicated to making Django Girls bigger and better. I work on our tutorial, help local organisers kick off their events, build resources and tools that will help us scale in the future. I’m really passionate about bringing more fantastic women into the field!
What are you the most proud of?
I am most proud of the way we organised DjangoCon Europe 2013. We took some really big risks, worked many hours and poured all of our hearts into making this an amazing experience for everyone. It really paid off: http://love.djangocircus.com/. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to do this.
What are you curious about?
After starting Django Girls I quickly became quite obsessed with removing the roadblocks that are so neatly laid out for people who are just starting with programming. I am curious how we, as a community, can be more emphatic and make it more easier for people to start programming and contribute to open source projects like Django.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
Besides organising conferences and events, which I loooove to do, I also love spending time with people close to me while traveling to quiet places, playing games, learning an ukulele and reading books.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
If you like doing this, then stick to it. Programming can sometimes be frustrating or boring, but it will get better. Don’t ever let someone tell you that you shouldn’t be programming. Ask for help often and help others
Thanks Ola! :)
Kinga Kieczkowska
@kieczkowskaYour Django Story
We are Kinga and Anna, two new Django Girls who met at the Django Girls workshop at EuroPython in Berlin last month (read the blog post below if you want to find out more about it, it was amazing!)
Kinga is 18 years old and from Poland but she is moving to Groningen in the Netherlands right now where she will study Computer Science. Very exciting! Anna is 24 and from Germany. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Catholic Theology but she is in love with programming and is working on a career in the field.
When Ola announced on Facebook that she wanted to start a blog series about awesome Django Girls we both said right away that we wanted to do this project and here it is our “Meet this (badass!) Django Girl“ or “Your Django Story“ series :)
What can you expect? Cool interviews with awesome ladies who work with Django and kick butts! The community is full of them and we are very happy that we can introduce you to them and their exciting Django stories on this blog. We will try to post two interviews each week. So stay tuned and read on!
If you are an awesome Django girl and would love to tell us your story or know a Django girl that should be featured on this blog please shoot us an e-mail at story@djangogirls.org. We would love to hear from you :)
We hope you’ll enjoy reading all the great Django stories and that they will inspire you to start coding yourself. Trust us, it’s awesome ;)
Enjoy the first story of Ola Sitarska.
Kinga and Anna
Kinga Kieczkowska
@kieczkowska
Annabell Ossowski
@OssAnna16September edition: Upcoming Django Girls events!
We’re happy happy happy to announce all the wonderful events that will be happening soon all over the Europe and the world! :) We truly couldn’t be more excited for what’s coming.
Django Girls Taipei, Taiwan
28th September 2014
organizer: Michelle Leu
website | facebook
Django Girls Nairobi, Kenya
2-3rd October 2014
organizer: Linda Ochwada
website | twitter
Django Girls Warsaw, Poland
8th November 2014
organizers: Ola Sitarska, Aneta Włodarczyk, Beata Bogdańska, Ela Jankowska
website | facebook | twitter
Django Girls Kraków, Poland
11th November 2014
organizers: Ola Sendecka, Maria Lowas
website | facebook | twitter
Django Girls Amsterdam, Netherlands
16th November 2014
organizers: Anne Koopman, Kinga Kieczkowska, Felicia Liu
website | twitter
Django Girls Edinburgh, Scotland
29th November 2014
organizer: Becky Smith
website | twitter
Django Girls Vienna, Austria
November 2014
organizer: Kay
twitter
Django Girls Łódź, Poland
6th December 2014
organizers: Justyna Kałużka, Marta Matros
twitter
Django Girls Budapest, Hungary
6th December 2014
organizer: Dori Czapari
twitter
Django Girls Mbale, Uganda
November 2014
Django Girls Brussels, Belgium
31st January 2015
If you’re interested in running your own Django Girls event, we would love to welcome you on board! http://djangogirls.org/pages/in-your-city/
Ola Sitarska
@olasitarskaThe first Django Girls happened!
I bought the djangogirls.org domain on 15th April. At that time I didn’t have plans to do Django Girls in any near future but I’ve kind of known for a long time that I would organize it one day. Just two weeks later I was going to Berlin for ThingsCon and Markus Holtermann tweeted me asking if we could meet. This meeting finally gave me a much needed kick in the butt to just go and do it.
I emailed Ola Sendecka just two weeks after that, when the EuroPython team agreed to host us. I knew Ola was the perfect person to help me with that: she is the best female Django developer I have the pleasure to know, I love working with her and we both really care about bringing more women into the Django world. Back then it was supposed to be this one-time thing we were doing to help bring more diversity into EuroPython, but it grew out of proportions on the very first day after we showed it to the world. I’m so happy it did!
The first Django Girls
For the first event we received 310 applications from 33 different countries. We were really stressed about running our first workshop. Yeah, we’ve done huge conferences before, but this is quite different. This is different because we care so much about good experiences: we know that the first experience is crucial and we wanted all of our 45 Django Girls to fall in love with programming.
The first Django Girls took place on Monday on the very first day of EuroPython 2014 in Berlin. We’ve managed to get together an amazing group of 45 women coming from 15 different countries. 15 great coaches showed up to spend their free time before, during and after the workshop teaching our attendees about the Internet, computers, the command line, Python, Django, open source and much much more.
We loved the energy, atmosphere, people and everything about this day. Our expectations were met to the fullest extent. 90% of our attendees finished the whole tutorial and successfully deployed their blogging application to Heroku. You could feel the excitement in the air! It was a challenge to make them stop and go get some rest after 11 (11!) hours of intense programming.
Experience
We believe that first experiences are the most important and I also know that there is a lot that we can do to make this first experience friendly, positive and leaving only good memories.
That’s why we invested a lot of time and energy in creating a great atmosphere. We did this by caring about little things like nice tablecloths, colorful posters, fresh flowers, sweet cupcakes and laser-cut Django Pony necklaces. But also by making sure that everyone was happy, motivated and felt totally awesome and accomplished.
I can’t stress enough how important these little big details are.
Tutorial
During the workshop everyone worked in small team (3 beginners + 1 coach) and they met each other before online on Google Hangout or Skype to do the installation and just get to know each other, so that there would beat least three friendly faces during the workshop.
All groups were following the tutorial. We spent a lot of time browsing the web for the perfect tutorial: one that is up to date, has an interesting topic and is beginner-friendly. And I don’t mean beginner-friendly in the terms of someone who is new just to Django. We were aiming for beginners who use their computers to only browse the Internet until now. There was not any resource that would fit that specific group. Shocking, isn’t it?
So we decided to write our own. 2 people, 5 evenings + nights, the tutorial was.. far from done. We didn’t have any more time to test it before the workshop, so we decided to do it on production: what’s a better environment to test it than 45 curious women, right? :)
While writing the tutorial, we focused on a couple of things:
learning by making mistakes – this is how we learn stuff in real life, too. Every step involved creating a bug first, learning how to read and understand the error and then fixing it. It made them understand how it all work together. It made them not afraid of errors, problems and bugs. This approach also showed them what programming is all about: solving problems. It worked out amazingly well.
assuming our reader knows nothing – if you’re a programmer, it is hard to put yourself in the mindset of a person who knows nothing about programming or computers. All other resources on the internet assumed that you know what a terminal is or that you’re familiar with urls, views and templates.
fast achievements – programming can get very frustrating if you spend a few hours on it, fix lots of bugs and accomplish nothing that looks real. That’s why we’re focusing on fast effects — doing things not necessarily in the right order, but in an order that gives rapid small wins that boost productivity and motivation.
“you’re awesome” – we’re fighting the impostor syndrome with every step. Celebrating small achievements is important.
All of this turned out to be really important during the workshop.
EuroPython
But Django Girls weren’t done after just one day: it was only a kick off to a full week filled with Python awesomeness.
Thanks to the EuroPython organizers’ generosity, every attendee received a full pass to the entire conference for free. We wondered if this week would be a waste of time or an actual learning experience for them, but decided to just try it and see.
It was the best decision ever: everyone showed up on the conference for the whole week, attending talks, trainings and parties. They had fun, they learned something new and it was really empowering for them to just go to some tutorial and be able to follow the instructions because they know their way around the command line already.
The best thing: you could actually see a difference that Django Girls made at the conference. You could see A LOT more women on the corridors and session rooms. It also gave us time to really get to know each other and make some meaningful connections. We were saying good-byes with tears in our eyes.
But the most wonderful thing happened during EuroPython Sprints! The Django Girls attendees also came for the Sprint time. We joined the Django team in their room and decided to show Django Girls how this open source thing works. Thanks to that, many of them contributed back to the tutorial by fixing typos and grammar or even writing whole new chapters on their own! Our inbox was flooded with Github notifications and the tutorial’s repository received more than 30 pull requests. Yay!
<3
Of course, all of this wouldn’t have happen without the support from our amazing sponsors and coaches! Thank you :)
What’s next?
Django Girls @ EuroPython was a wonderful experience for us, attendees and coaches. The 2nd Django Girls just happened at PyCon Australia thanks to great work done by Elena Williams.
While choosing our attendees, we focused on looking for leaders. People who will get back to their hometown and do something awesome with their new skills. We also spent some time to write down everything we’ve learned in a Django Girls Organizer’s Manual. Thanks to our amazing attendees, Django Girls will now happen in 20 new cities!
You can help us make a small dent in the universe, too. Want to organize, coach, sponsor or support? Drop us a line and let’s talk! hello@djangogirls.org
Ola Sitarska
@olasitarskaDjangoGirls - how we scored applications?
After we’ve sent acceptance/rejection e-mails, we received a number of questions about why an application was rejected.
We think it is a good idea to share with all of you what criteria we had when we scored applications. It will be a good future reference for other workshops organisers and potential attendees.
There were four people involved. Me, Ola and Andrew and Daniele, who were doing it on behalf of Django Software Foundation.
To ensure that the first score is not influenced by others, each person scored applications without knowing other three people scores. After making a first scored, one could see other marks.
Order of application was also not determined - we scored in random order, so the probability that one person is scored higher/lower only because she was always on top/bottom of the list, was low.
We scored each application from 1 to 5.
Here is a list of things we took into account when scoring (suggested by Daniele):
what is the realistic benefit to the applicant?
what is the realistic benefit to others?
does the applicant have clear, specific, concrete, realistic ideas about what to do with the knowledge?
does the applicant have clear, specific, concrete, realistic ideas about how she will share it?
do I feel the applicant really, really wants this opportunity, or is it just an interesting offer to her?
what is a overall value-for-money, if the applicant is asking for funds?
what is my overall feeling about the application?
As you can see, there were a lot of points we took into account when scoring. It was very, very hard to get in. If the application was not very detailed - the chance to be accepted was very low. But writing a lot was not a recipe for success. We looked for concrete ideas and commitments in applications!
We received a number of applications from people who would probably be bored during workshops. If you study Computer Science or are a web developer or programmer (but in a different technology), then it is possible this is the reason you were rejected. We don’t want to waste your time :).
There were also a number of application we had to reject because our Financial Aid fund was limited. We had around 5000 EUR to distribute over 40 people, so we had to reject people who asked for 1000 EUR or more.
Overall, it was a very, very hard choice. We received so many wonderful applications! We can only hope that it will be possible to organize next chapters of DjangoGirls in many different places in the world, so people who could not attend because of the cost of travel, will be able to join!
We want to thank Andrew Godwin and Daniele Procida for spending many, many hours scoring the applications! Thank you!
Django Girls @ EuroPython: Schedule
We have finalized the schedule for first Django Girls ever at EuroPython in Berlin:
21st July 2014, Monday
8:00 - early registration for Django Girls at BCC
8:30 - workshops kick off!
10:30 - 11:30 - break for EuroPython Welcome and breakfast
11:30 - back to code! <3
13:30 - 14:30 - break for PyLadies lunch
14:30 - workshops
16:30 - 17:00 - coffee break
17:00 - 19:00 - more coding!
19:00 - 19:30 - wrap up
22nd - 27th July 2014
For the rest of the week you’ll be attending EuroPython conference. The schedule for conference sessions is here.
Don’t forget to attend PyLadies Barbeque Night on July 24, 2014, 7:00 PM.
Workshops
During workshops every attendee will have a chance to learn following things:
- Python - installation, introduction, basic topics (data types, methods, loops, if statements, variables, etc)
- Virtualenv - installation, basic overview
- Pip - installation, how it works?
- Django - installation, build your first application - a blog (setup, database, urls, views, models, forms, templates)
- HTML & CSS - basic introduction
- Git - basic overview, create a repo, push and pull
- Deploying your application to a server
- Registering domain and setting up DNS
At the end, every attendee will build a fully functional blog available in the internet! :)
Spark the change
In the last few weeks we’ve got a lot of questions from coaches, applicants and followers about our idea for the workshops. Some think that it’s not possible to teach anyone how to program in just one day. And we agree. But Django Girls is not really about that.
So what is is about?
The main mission of the event is to inspire and spark the change we want to make. There is no way that total beginners will grasp all about HTML, CSS, Python and Django in just 8 hours, especially if they’ve never programmed before. That’s why our mission is to do two (maybe three?) things well:
Show the joy of coding
This is probably the most important thing: we need to show them how awesome it feels when you’ve programmed something and it finally works, so you can admire the results of your work. How quickly you can accomplish something that looks good and is useful for you. How great it is to understand how internet works, being able to imagine something and build it. This part is all about inspiration, befriending the technology, making it more approachable. Getting all the “I don’t know how it works”, “I can’t do this”, “I’m afraid” and changing them into “It’s doable”, “It’s fun”, “It’s hard, but I really like this”.
Teach how to learn
You can’t learn Chinese in one day or a month, but with if you make an effort and spend some time practicing - you can learn it. The second goal of Django Girls event is to show everyone how they can learn on their own after the workshops. We won’t give ready answers for every question, but we can show tools, resources and the whole wonderfulness of the Internet, open source community and, obviously, Stackoverflow. We can show that nearly every answer for your question already exists and you can find it in Google, you just need to know how to ask and search! We will practise this during the workshops.
Support group
Django Girls won’t end after the workshops are over — it’s just a beginning. We know how hard it is sometimes to find a safe place in the Internet when you can ask the stupidest question and don’t be afraid that someone will laugh. We hope to provide this place for everyone who is still motivated to learn, program and be better. Safe, awesome, friendly support group of your new friends from all over Europe and the World :)
That’s the plan. We’re so so so so excited! If you still haven’t applied, you still have 3 days to apply. If you or your company want to support what we do, get in touch: hello@djangogirls.org.
Django Girls is getting bigger!
Django Girls is already 12 days old today, yay! We're extremely happy to announce that our workshop just doubled its size :)
Thanks to generosity of EuroPython 2014, we are now able to accommodate twice more people. Exactly 40 women will start their journey with Python and Django on the first of EuroPython 2014 and stay for the whole conference to learn even more.
That also means that we need more coaches! We looking for 3 or 4 coaches, so if you’re going to EuroPython and want to do something good, shoot us an email: hello@djangogirls.org.
\o/