Your Django Story: Meet Dori Czapari

This is a special post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. It is the first interview of a Django Girls alumni who works as a software developer now :) Read more about the interview series here.

Dori is a software developer at Allmyles in Budapest. She was an attendee of the first Django Girls workshop in Berlin, coached at Django Girls Amsterdam and organized Django Girls Budapest. When Dori isn’t writing awesome programs, travelling to conferences or workshops or working on cool new Django Girls projects she likes to fire juggle, take dance classes, hang out at the hackerspace in Budapest, eat good food or spend hours reading either books or code. You can follow her on Twitter @doriczapari.

How did your story with code start?

 At a family holiday. I just graduated from Psychology and I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself, because I haven’t found a Master’s degree I wanted to apply for. My mom had enough of my whining and sat down with that horribly thick catalogue of all the universities and courses and made a long list of those I could apply for with my diplomas. That’s how I discovered Digital Humanities, and I started to think - I want to stay connected to humanities but the traditional career paths didn’t appeal to me at all. I was never afraid of computers (in fact, when I was a little girl, back in the DOS days, I could find my way so well around the system that my parents always said I’m gonna be a programmer :)) But I forgot about this for a long time because in high school I decided I like literature and languages, and scientific subjects are no concern of mine. Boy, was I wrong.

I started reading and researching about Digital Humanities and the idea grew on me more and more. I decided I’m going to apply next semester, but I still had a lot of time on my hands - I only had a Philosophy thesis to write, no more classes, and I was working part time. I wanted to see what programming is like, to be in a better position when I apply. Almost by accident, I got a great tip from one of my friends who is also a self-taught programmer and around that time he was already working at the most famous Hungarian startup. He said I should take the online course he started with - a beginner Python course at Udacity.com, and it was a well-needed kick in the butt. Before I knew it I was regularly spending three consecutive days in sweatpants, working on course exercises all day long, running around and shouting with joy when I managed to solve some silly problem.

This kind of analytical, dissecting problem-solving thinking necessary for even the simplest programming tasks was something I left behind when I graduated from high-school, because this is something you almost never use if you study humanities. It was totally unfamiliar when I started this course so it took quite some time to accommodate myself to it, but I realized I missed it a lot. It was very reassuring to deal with problems that have a clear solution, with a straightforward path to them. In humanities I always faced a certain elusiveness I wasn’t comfortable with. With computational problems it’s very different.

Anyway, as I’d decided early on that I hate math and I’m just not gonna care (oh hey teenage years) I have a lot to make up for. But this also means everything is so new and exciting now :)

After some time I had to bow to the fact that coding is the most fun thing I’ve ever done and  I decided I’m not going back to university just yet. Instead I’m gonna focus my time on getting better at coding and I’ll somehow try to make a career out of it. So I kept my part time job, took some other courses online and eventually landed a Django Girls workshop spot which accelerated everything by 500%…

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was a Philosophy and Psychology major, and I also studied Spanish, Latin and Greek.  I considered myself a truly liberal arts kind of person, but I absolutely hated writing essays. Instead, I was good at things that require strict systematic thinking - like formal logic (I was the best in class!) and dead languages with ridiculously many, carefully applied grammatical rules. I had several career plans, like staying in academia as a philosophy & latin professor, becoming a therapist specialized in this very marginal intersection of philosophy and psychology called philosophical praxis or working at a foster home. All of these turned out to be either not entirely suitable for me or lacking actual perspective.

What do you love the most about coding?

Apart from the thing I mentioned about my relationship with computational thinking, I think knowing how to interact with computers is very, very cool :) Also, I love that I can make things that work, from scratch, in a relatively short time. That problems have solutions and there’s a clear way to them. That everything has an answer and I already have a lot of practice in looking for them. This experience shaped my whole mindset in general. I love that there’s always something new to learn. I love the feeling I get when something finally clicks and starts working, the excitement hasn’t faded a bit since the first days.

But what I love the most is the people I got to meet because of coding :)

 

How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?

Before Django Girls I was completely on my own – I’ve been learning programming for more than half a year by the time I got accepted so it changed pretty much everything. Getting in was such a huge thing for me, I remember when I got the acceptance email I couldn’t stop jumping and crying for half an hour. I can say with confidence that the week at EuroPython was one of the greatest weeks of my life – so many new impressions, nice people, first time in Berlin, finally I can talk to people about programming - what else do I need? :)

When I came home I was so overwhelmed and inspired I quit my part time receptionist job right away. This was a reckless move, and could have turned out so bad, but I was thinking if I’m lucky and hardworking, I could get myself an internship soon, and if not, even being a babysitter is better than that absolutely demotivating job. I started to work on organizing Django Girls Budapest, and I met more and more local Python people.

I don’t know how I had the courage to do it because I’m totally not the public speaker type, but I gave a talk at the local Python meetup about my journey in programming, and Django Girls. This was my first meetup ever. The only person I knew from EuroPython wasn’t there, so I didn’t know anyone in the audience, by the way they were all men, professionals of the field I just took my first steps at – it was so incredibly intimidating, but I did it!

After the talk someone came to me and asked if I was looking for a job. Of course I was! (Okay, I haven’t actively started looking yet, I kept postponing writing a CV.) So we agreed on an interview next week and then I got hired!!! The people I’m working with are incredibly awesome and the work itself is a huge challenge everyday but also super exciting! I love it so much, it’s the best thing that could have happened to me. (And it happened partly because of Django Girls so I’m very grateful!) I still have a hard time believing I’m an actual programmer. Okay, I still have a hard time believing I know what a Python dictionary or a web framework is :) It wasn’t so long ago when I had zero idea about anything computer-related after all.

I’m level 3 at Django Girls, meaning I was an attendee, a coach and an organizer :) With each role I got to have different insights about what all this means - what’s it like being part of a great community, how to teach complete beginners (and how far, surprisingly, I am from their level, so my explanations are less clear than I expected) and what’s it like living off of a to-do list for months to get every little detail come together and be very proud in the end when something awesome happens :)

All in all, Django Girls made me more confident in myself and in that I can make things people are interested in, it taught me I don’t have to be a superhero to change people’s lives, it’s sufficient if I love something enough to want to make others love it too :)

 

Why Django?

Because of Django Girls! I didn’t know much about frameworks before the workshop, and I’m still very much a beginner in it, so I can’t compare it to anything else. But for all I know, the Django community is awesome, and I’d want to be part of it even if Django sucked. :D

 

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

Coding-wise, I have many project plans but I haven’t found the time yet to start them, my life has turned upside down in the past few weeks with this new job and Django Girls. But I’ve just become a member of the local hackerspace so I think that will be the perfect place to finally make something. Those people are unbelievable – a few weeks ago the water pipe broke in the basement and they made a construction of a bucket, some measuring tool and a Spark, wrote a program to monitor the water level in the bucket and put it on the web. Incredibly cool!

Other plans include keeping Django Girls Budapest alive, making a second event a few months from now and coaching at other DG workshops!

 

What are you the most proud of?

I don’t want to sound pompous but I’m very very proud of what I achieved in this past year. I would never have expected myself to sit down everyday to learn something I don’t even know if I’m good at without any human feedback at all. And there were situations where I had to push myself quite a bit, like when I gave the talk at the meetup, or when I had to be super organized when preparing for the Budapest workshop (which is very different from my usual, messy ways), but in the end all these were very rewarding and give me a reason to be proud :) Besides this, I’m very proud of all the girls who came to learn coding with us at the workshop, and if there’s anyone who got enough motivation to continue coding, it makes me incredibly happy and feel it was worth all of it.

 

What are you curious about?

Ever since I started coding I’m saying pretty much everything! Things that made me shiver or roll my eyes before, like algorithms, became my favorite topics to read about. I’d really like to brush up on my math skills, now that I’m out of high school I assume I would enjoy it a lot :) And I’m eager to learn about anything computers-related. Something specific I’d like to know more about right now is Raspberry Pi. We have one at the office but I never get around to play with it. Before coding, I was most curious about very old languages, like Latin, Greek and Hebrew, because even the most simple words have multiple layers of meaning, and this is wonderful. I’m really interested in languages in general, etymology and stuff. I hope to find some time for learning something new soon.

 

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

I’m a fire juggler, and our team is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year! Other than this I have pretty usual hobbies: music (I used to make music too when I was in high school, I should start over!), films, books, cooking, EATING, dance (I go to contemporary ballet classes). But it was so long ago I had any free time at all I almost don’t remember what it feels like :)

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Talk to everyone about what you do. I found that people are incredibly helpful in general and you can learn about so many awesome things in programming this way. That I started using Linux, learned about text editors (always wondered what the colorful text in the black box is in the videos) or know the best terminal commands are all consequences of talking to new acquaintances about that I just started programming.

Never be discouraged because you feel stupid or something doesn’t work out right away (or for the 1000th try). It’s normal. It’s the first step to learning something! And if you don’t know something, never be afraid to ask questions! Don’t try to make a better impression by not revealing you don’t know it! Seriously, don’t :)

Thank you so much Dori! <3

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