Your Django Story: Meet Helen Sherwood-Taylor
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Helen is a freelance developer working in London and lives just outside of London with her partner. She’s been using Python since 1999 (before it had list comprehensions or booleans!) and in her free time she enjoys cycling, running, photography, travel and kinitting.
How did your story with code start?
In school I was very much inclined towards maths and science, and I’ve always loved solving puzzles so I think programming is a pretty good fit for the way my mind works.
I first coded when I was 12 on the ZX Spectrum we had at home, copying programs out of books and learning some of the basic concepts. I didn’t code for a few years after that, then at 18 I went off to university with my first computer all of my own, a 386 running Windows 3.1. It came with a QBasic interpreter and the Snake game as example code and I started hacking around with that in my spare time, adding new levels and realising I quite enjoyed programming.
Then I met my partner Jim, a long time computer geek (and now also a Django developer) who helped me to realise I could code for a living. I eventually got a better computer and started teaching myself Visual Basic, followed by C++. I got my first programming job in 1999, using C++ to generate television graphics. I also started learning Python around the same time. Since then I’ve worked with C++, Java, PHP, Python and Javascript. I’m now lucky enough to be able to work full time with Python and Django. Ten years ago it was very hard to find Python jobs, and it’s been really great to see Python grow in popularity since then - I think Django has helped a lot with that.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
Programming was my first “real” job and I’ve been doing it for about 15 years now. I wanted to be a scientist when i was in school, but I didn’t really know about programming as a career option.
What do you love the most about coding?
A lot of things - solving a problem elegantly, fixing something that’s broken, making something faster, writing code that is beautiful to read. I love how many different things can be accomplished through coding, and there’s always so much more out there to learn. I get bored when things are the same for too long so it’s great to be part of an industry that’s constantly evolving and has so much variety.
Why Django?
For a start, it’s written in Python and that was enough to get me interested.
My first impressions of Django were just how much it gives you for free - the login system, the admin system, models, forms and so on, common things that often get written over and over (often quite badly) in web projects - it’s so nice to know those things are taken care of, and be able to focus on the interesting and unique aspects of a project.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I don’t really have a personal project on the go right now. The last thing I did was a hardware project with a Raspberry Pi and a character LCD screen - the Pi runs a Python script which fetches train times off the web, and displays the next two trains. It sits in my hallway so as I’m leaving the house I can see instantly how long until the next train - have I already missed it, will I make it if I run, or can I have a nice leisurely walk to the station - extremely useful!
What are you the most proud of?
I helped build the BBC Weather site a couple of years ago and that’s probably the work I’m proudest of. In general, I’m proud of the work I put into every project, especially tackling some of the more challenging ones. Also, the ability I’ve built up over time to dive into new projects, read code and understand how everything fits together.
What are you curious about?
So many things! My work is mostly in web development but I like to look beyond that in my spare time. I’d like to do more hardware projects and learn more about electronics - I just got a MicroPython which is a tiny microcontroller that runs Python - and I’m trying to decide what to do with it!
I’m also intrigued by machine learning and image recognition and would love to do more along those lines - so far I’ve played around a bit with scikit-learn and tried a couple of tutorial competitions on Kaggle.
Another thing I’d like to do more with is Kivy, a platform for creating mobile apps in Python. I’ve made a couple of apps with it but would love to do more.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I love spending time outdoors when I’m not at the computer. I enjoy mountain biking and trail running, especially when there’s also a navigation / orienteering challenge involved. I also like to travel and see new places - I’ve done some bicycle tours across Europe including UK to Poland and UK to Corsica (different trips) and also travelled around south east Asia (no bike) which I loved, especially the food. I’m also into photography, and knitting cute little hats for my baby nieces and nephews.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Don’t worry about how much you know. It’s great that there are so many different technologies out there and so many ways to solve a problem - but the downside is that, no matter how much you know, there’s always somebody talking about some language or library you’ve never heard of, or haven’t quite got around to trying out - it’s easy to feel like you don’t know enough. Don’t let that get to you - be proud of what you do know and be prepared to keep on learning!
Also, when you get stuck on a difficult problem, don’t let it drive you crazy. Try stepping away from it, go and make a cup of tea, distract yourself for a bit - or try talking to somebody. They might have the answer, or it might just help to talk it through.
Thanks Helen! :)
