Your Django Story: Meet Joanna Tustanowska
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Joanna is a software developer based in Warsaw, Poland. She works at Titanis, a company which creates software assisting in rehabilitation of neurological patients. Currently, she codes in Python and CoffeeScript/JavaScript.
She likes cycling to work, has two cats and sings in more than one choir.
How did your story with code start?
Both of my parents are programmers but that didn’t cause me to show much interest in computers when I was younger. I changed my mind after graduating from high school. Since I was good enough at math to pass entry exams to my University, I made the easiest choice and went to study Computer Science there. From that moment it stopped being that easy… I had a lot of trouble with my studies. It turned out that I need to work a lot and believe in myself even just a little to move forward and I was constantly failing at both. But with time and support from my friends I learned to love studying and working in this field.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was a clueless teenager :)
What do you love the most about coding?
I take part in building usable things, even though they aren’t physical objects. Without any manual/engineering skills, I get to create something. And it works, sometimes :)
Also, thanks to coding I am learning a lot about work ethic, perseverance, pushing my limits, teamwork(!), and many other character building things, unrelated to programming itself.
Why Django?
I love programming in Python and I do some web stuff sometimes. Django is a great web framework which makes many website-related things easy (if not somewhat magical at first). Plus, it has a very well written documentation - it is important to have good docs when you learn a new library.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
At work, I am a part of the team that makes two very interesting projects: http://www.neuro-forma.com/en/ Neuroforma – a computer program designed to support home rehabilitation for people with various neurological disorders, and http://autilius.pl/ - a program directed to children with autism and their therapists. In short, these projects engage users in various physical and cognitive activities by using motion capture and Extended Reality technologies (think Kinect).
After hours I am starting to play with programming for Android. We’ll see what will come out of it.
What are you the most proud of?
That I stuck to programming despite feeling very discouraged in the beginning. Also, I am very glad that I recently attended the Django Girls workshop as a mentor. This teaching experience was very empowering and humbling at the same time and as a bonus, I got to spend a day and a half with some wonderful women.
What are you curious about?
About everything! Especially if it involves some casual clicking through a stream of articles on the Internet :)
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
Right now my main hobby is singing. I spend a good part of my free time on choir rehearsals.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Learn to ask for help! Find some more experienced people or a local community and bug them with questions. Very often the sole act of asking a specific question can guide you to a solution because you start to better understand your problem.
Thanks Joanna! :)
