Your Django Story: Meet Claire Reynaud

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

Claire is an iOS and Django developer. She works as a freelancer from Saint Etienne, in France. She started to work as a Java developer at Trango, a mobile virtualization company, acquired in 2008 by VMware. After working in VMware’s Horizon mobile team, she joined Epyx in Switzerland, where she discovered iOS and Django. In her free time, Claire likes to climb via ferrata and play board games. You can follow her @ClaireReynaud.

How did your story with code start?

I went to the University in Lyon, France, to study mathematics. If you wanted to study maths there, you had to take computer sciences too, for 2 years. This is how I started to code. Before that I had absolutely no idea what coding was about. I discovered that programming was really fun.

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I’ve always worked as a programmer. I have been doing this for 10 years now.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

There are many things that I like about coding. One of the things I love the most is that I learn new stuff all the time.

 

Why Django?

I learned about Django when I was working in Switzerland for a company that was doing both mobile and web development. First I was doing only mobile development there, but I had the opportunity to start doing some Django too.

I like Django, but I don’t use it on a daily basis for my work as a freelancer. I am mainly doing mobile development for iOS.

 

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

I don’t have any side project right now. I started to work as a freelancer this year and I have been busy shipping apps to showcase what I can do and working on my first customer projects.

At the beginning of this year, I did a Django workshop for DuchessSwiss (a group of women developers from the Java community). They were curious about Python and Django, so I was happy to help :).

 

What are you the most proud of?

When someone uses software that I built and tells me it made their day.

 

What are you curious about?

What motivates people to do what they do.

 

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

I like to climb via ferrata. I also love board games and electric guitars.

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Go to dev meetups. Review code and get your code reviewed. If something works but you don’t understand why, take the time to understand. That’s really ok if it takes time. You’ll learn a lot this way.

Thanks Claire! :)

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