Your Django Story: Meet Rachel Sanders
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Rachel is a software engineer and tech lead for Linkedin and founder of San Francisco PyLadies. She has a degree in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley, but thinks computers are almost as cool as stars. When not coding, she’s an aspiring cellist and writer, and enjoys accidentally spilling glitter on the floor and finding it everywhere for weeks.
How did your story with code start?
My mom worked as a secretary when I was growing up, and she occasionally brought home some of the first portable computers - 30 lb Compaq boxes the size of modern-day desktops with a 9” monochrome screen and 5 ¼ floppy drives. She’d let me play on them when she wasn’t doing work in the evenings, and I spent hours trying to figure out how it worked. This was before the internet, so I had no documentation and I knew no one else who was doing this sort of thing, I just found it fun. I didn’t get very far in terms of accomplishing anything except figuring out how to use 1-2-3 Lotus and the basics of DOS.
Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened to that little girl had she had anybody to ask questions of, or any books to read. It’s one of the reasons I’m passionate about education and outreach.
I didn’t truly start to code until after college. I graduated with from Berkeley with a degree in astrophysics, completely burnt out and discouraged from continuing because it seemed like there was no jobs and no future in that field. Having no idea what else to do, I got a job as a contractor running Word automation scripts that turned Word doc into stuff our customers actually saw, like HTML or PDFs. It was boring, slow work, because the scripts broke constantly. I learned how to fix them, because it was faster than reporting to the two ex-doc writers who programmed them.
The first bug I ever fixed was an integer overflow - the script crashed on a particular large Word document, on the 32,768th paragraph. I’d been buying coding books, trying to learn more, and I remember that number as being special, and I poured through the code trying to find that place, and yup, they’d stored the counter in a signed 16 bit integer. It made me feel amazing, to figure that out. It still makes me smile to remember that.
That job led to one where I did more coding, which in turn led to one that was even more coding, and so on and so on. Each job taught me more, and I tried to learn all that I could from what I was doing. Eventually, I ended up here at LinkedIn.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I took a small detour in between coding jobs where I tried out IT support. I much prefer coding.
What do you love the most about coding?
It brings me so much joy. I love math and problem solving, and coding just clicks with that part of my brain. As I’ve developed in my career, I’ve moved to building larger scale systems and using my skills to make tools and applications to delight and ease work for people. I love seeing what I make be useful.
Why Django?
I don’t work with Django professionally, although I like it quite a bit as a framework and use it for hobby projects. You can’t beat the ease of use and the library ecosystem. Somebody out there usually has written the thing you need to do. Laziness is a virtue in engineering.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m an organizer for PyLadies, and we’ve grown massively over the last several years with dozens of groups all over the world. I’m in the midst of organizing a global event (using Django!) that everybody can participate in, where you take 24 hours to learn something new about coding, and teach someone else. I’m really excited about it, and I hope I get to share it with you all soon.
What are you the most proud of?
Helping start PyLadies. I know how difficult it is to scramble up the giant walls erected around the tech world and how hard it is to make it, and I want to give a hand up to as many people that I can reach.
Volunteer work is difficult and thankless at times, but it’s all worth it and more when people tell me they’ve gotten a job thanks to me. I can’t even tell you how awesome that is to hear. (I tell them I only helped. They did the real work.)
What are you curious about?
I’ve started reading about UI/UX best practices, and there’s a lot there the software world could learn from that field. Imagine you could track metrics on how long it takes to learn a codebase, or the average cognitive load it takes to understand a code path. That’s fantasy, of course, but I want to understand what’s hard about those problems and come up with best practices to minimize them.
I’m planning to spend a good portion of 2015 learning as much as I can on the field.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I love learning new things. I picked up the cello a few years ago, and am starting to play music with other people, which is both terrifying and fun. I’m also learning to horseback ride, which is also terrifying and fun, although for different reasons. And I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month to try and learn to be a better writer. In less lofty hobbies, I play more Diablo 3 and Hearthstone than is strictly necessary.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
There’s nothing like solving a problem for yourself or someone else. I personally can’t learn anything without having a concrete goal to work towards. I’m learning iOS programming right now by solving a problem for another department.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your code will be terrible. It’s okay. You have to be terrible before you get to kinda good. Find supporters and cheerleaders if you can, and keep at it. Find what interests you, and follow that.
At the same time, if something isn’t working, take the time to dig into why it isn’t working. Don’t just mimic, try to understand what you’re doing and why. That’s the secret to learning anything.
Thanks Rachel! :)
