Your 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! :)
