Your Django Story: Meet Svetlana Sapelova

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

Svetlana was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russia and graduated from the computer science faculty in her hometown. Within half a year after graduation she moved to Budapest to start working as web developer. Svetlana stayed there for a year and then relocated to Slovenia where she is still living. She works as a front-end developer in a Dutch startup and is an active member of CodeCatz, a great group of people, mostly girls, learning to code together. Svetlana likes to snowboard, learn languages (not only programming ones) and doing yoga.

How did your story with code start?

I graduated from the faculty of computer science in 2010. The reason I got enrolled there is that I always thought in the era of tech progress the world would always need more and more programmers. Besides I wanted to have a job that makes my brain work hard every single day because only then I feel productive.

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I went to school and played the piano.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

As I said, it keeps my brain in working mode. Besides it such a dynamic field that I learn something new every day.

 

Why Django?

It was the choice of CodeCatz (my team that has built http://events.codeweek.eu/). We had one month to build the first version of the page, so we were looking for a framework most of the team had knowledge about. So it was Django. That’s how I started to learn it.

 

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

My first serious Django project is http://events.codeweek.eu/ that me and my friends from CodeCatz (https://twitter.com/CodeCatz) started building together in March 2014. In the beginning we wanted to make a website where people can upload events taking place during CodeEu week. However, it became really popular among organizers of the coding events, and now you can find hundreds of events happening all year round.

 

What are you the most proud of?

First I am really proud of being part of the great team called CodeCatz. We are mostly girls that learn to code together, meeting on a weekly basis and helping newbies to delve into the world of programming. I am happy to see our work brings results, I like to see girls getting interested in programming, learning, progressing.

Second, I am really proud our first serious project with CodeCatz is successful. It’s a wonderful feeling to see a number of events is rapidly growing. It means we did a great job and it encourages me to continue and proceed to the next challenges.

 

What are you curious about?

Everything related to web development. I can spend a lot of my free time reading articles and exploring code of open source projects because I am sure one of the keys to quality code is learning from others.

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

My hobby is to learn, as much as possible. Usually I dedicate my free time either to learning something new about web development or to master some foreign language (currently it’s French).

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Keep doing it, never give up. Learn as much as possible, talk to programmers, ask them questions, do your own projects.

Thanks Svetlana! :)

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