Your Django Story: Meet Lynn Root

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

Lynn is an insomniac software engineer for Spotify, founder of the San Francisco Chapter of PyLadies, board member of the Python Software Foundation, and member of the Django Software Foundation. She has a business degree in finance and economics, but fell in love with programming in 2011. Lynn likes to speak. A lot. She particularly talks on the Python community, as well as the technical work she’s done.

How did your story with code start?

This is the “long” description: http://www.roguelynn.com/words/my-path-into-engineering/  

The TL;DR version: I wanted to get a master’s in financial engineering, which required knowing how to program in C.  I had no programming knowledge, so I took an online course through Harvard. It was there that I said “f$ck finance” and continued to learn how to code.

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was an analyst for a couple of different banks where I managed & analysed the bank’s assets & liabilities.  It was actually a pretty awesome time to be in that area since I joined right when the huge economic recession just began.  

 

What do you love the most about coding?

The aspect of creating something out of nothing - it’s so addicting. Some folks, myself included, have an innate need to create.  We have painters, poets, musicians, dancers, street performers - many other creative fields.  While I’ve dabbled in painting & drawing, adding the logic element you get from programming is just invigorating!

 

Why Django?

For that course that I first took, I wrote my final project using Django. To be honest, at that time, I was an utter n00b, and didn’t understand the concept of web frameworks and such. I just knew I wanted to write something in Python. Google helped; I think I literally searched for “websites in python” with Django being referenced many times.  

What immediately sold me was the tutorial. It was *exactly* what I needed; it told me exactly what to type and what to get working.

Looking back, that code I wrote for my project is absolute crap. But the Django tutorial stuck with me; I started leading PyLadies workshops based off of it, as well as hosted sprints to help Django’s beginner documentation.

 

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

I’m super excited - Spotify’s API console (https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/) was released a month or two ago, which I wrote myself (shhh…in Flask…don’t tell anyone!). What I am really psyched about is the code that I wrote for it, I am open sourcing it. It will be two different projects, and the first one will be out soon. Watch out for my obsessively excited tweets (@roguelynn) and blog posts about it :D

 

What are you the most proud of?

To be honest and a touch solipsistic, I’m most proud of myself.  

Before entering into the world of programming, I didn’t find much to be proud about. Sure, I went to college, did the extra curriculars that I felt I should do, studied what I thought was acceptable; basically went through the motions to be an “average” member of society.

But within a span of 3 years, I taught myself how to program (still learning!), have spoken at about 20 conferences (totally lost track), help start many PyLadies locations as well as run the SF chapter, have been elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation, somehow got myself featured in a major glossy magazine, and - most importantly - gainfully & happily employed as a software engineer.

I’m not so much proud of my accomplishments, but more so of the discipline I have taught myself (in which the accomplishments are what I see as rewards).

 

What are you curious about?

Tough question.  I’m actively curious about the changing atmosphere of diversity within our industry.  I’m looking forward to see how this movement affects the industry a decade or two from now.  I say “actively” since I find myself doing a lot of work to better the environment for minorities (focusing on women), both through PyLadies and from within Spotify.

Passively (as in, I like watching from my armchair), I’m curious about the future of security and privacy for the average user and developer. When will it be super easy, cheap, and reliable to deploy a simple website over HTTPS? (getting there!) Or VPN and GPG being wide-spread among the average user?

 

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

It varies between personal/pet code projects, arts & crafts (I love the forthemakers.com monthly subscription crafting box!), and in general, embodying my spirit animal - the sloth.

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

A lot of folks think that one needs strong motivation to learn how to program. You can be super motivated one day, and completely apathetic the next.  If you just rely on motivation, you’ll have a lot of unfinished projects.  

My key advice is discipline.  I will assure you that discipline is not an inherent quality. Similar to muscular strength and endurance, the brain needs “exercise” to develop discipline.  

I say to start small, start with the “5 lb weights” - like a handful of Learn Python the Hard Way exercises every day (it’s okay to repeat stuff too!) - and soon the habits that you’ll build will pay off. And just like building strength & endurance, you may get “injured” or “catch a cold” forcing you to back off; you will experience a lot of frustration from sh!t not making sense, cryptic error messages, or accidently deleting your database. It’s okay - take a break for a few hours, days, maybe a week or so. But having discipline will allow you to come back and plow through those moments where you lack motivation.

Thanks Lynn! :)

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