Your Django Story: Meet Carol Willing
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Carol can frequently be heard saying “That’s so cool. How does it work? I would love to learn more about it.” She has enjoyed developing software and electronics and teaching others for over 20 years.
Growing up on the east coast, she was inspired by nature, the arts, and math. Wanting to learn more about those interests, she earned a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Duke University and an MS in Management from MIT. Her education and work experience in small and large companies taught her to respect the value of “using what you have learned to make something better and sharing what you know with others”.
Carol is currently an active contributor to open source projects, like OpenHatch, a co-organizer of PyLadies San Diego, and an independent developer of hardware and software. Weaving her love of art, music, and nature with Arduino based wearable soft circuits, she is developing an open hardware project to assist an in-home caregiver with gentle, compassionate support of a loved one with Alzheimer’s.
Today, she spends much of her time learning and inspiring others to blend their unique interests and technology to create something new, silly, beautiful, or helpful.
How did your story with code start?
The simplified answer would be I started coding back in 1977 in 6th grade during an informal outreach program at Bell Labs learning about mainframes and science research.
Though the more honest answer, I got into programming a year later in 1978 when my middle school received an Apple II computer. At the time, I was a 7th grader that loved math, playing sports, and going to school dances. I was also very self conscious about fitting in socially and tried to minimize how much I loved math.
My school had something called “Project Venture”, a special program for “gifted and talented” students ,where I spent part of the school day with 3 or 4 other students. My 6th grade year in “Project Venture” didn’t go smoothly. I felt like I was being punished for being good at math and separated from my friends.
Yet, 7th grade brought a new eager teacher for “Project Venture”. On the first day of class, I arrived late to class. In the room there were three boys playing Dungeons and Dragons. My teacher enthusiastically welcomed me and asked “Would you like to play?” No. “What would you like to do?” ‘Go back to my friends in the normal class.’
After it was clear that I would be in “Project Venture” whether I wanted to be there or not, I was told to choose two things to work on for the next month. `Would it be ok if I tried to use the Apple? Set it up. Learn how it works. Maybe write a program.’ For two years, I used that Apple computer and loved exploring how it worked and what I could make while using it.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was a kid when I started programming so I did kid things like sports, Girl Scouts, choir, and reading math books and puzzles for fun.
What do you love the most about coding?
One thing that I love is the joy of exploration that comes with coding. When reading source code, I like trying to find my way through the thought process and layers of function calls to understand what is going on. I feel a bit like an archeologist or a detective gathering clues. It’s a puzzle lover’s dream.
Yet, what I love most is the creativity that goes into coding. Looking at a problem in different ways, working with diverse ideas and people to pull together something better than just my individual idea, and seeing the myriad of ways that the code is put to use are things that bring creativity to coding. At the end of the day, coding is something I enjoy and I love sharing it with others that are interested.
Why Django?
Simply, Django is the web framework used by the OpenHatch project, a project that helps people learn how to contribute to open source. A couple of years ago, I met some really thoughtful and talented people on the project. Liking their community, I wanted to help out so I started writing documentation. Asheesh and others were great mentors and helped me learn about the code base’s history.
Around the same time, I joined the San Diego PyLadies group and the San Diego Python User Group. They were doing a Test Driven Development workshop with Django. The folks at the workshop were kind and welcoming, and I learned quite a bit of Django informally from them. We have a lot of fun sharing information and ideas.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Now that Fab Lab San Diego’s location move is complete, I’m looking forward to creating a Gentle Code Garden within the space. Nothing fancy but a place where people, from all walks of life, can gather to share ideas about software development and explore software and programming at their pace in a supportive environment. For the next six months, it will be primarily open hours for outreach and hopefully later in 2015 some community projects where people work as a team on something that interests them and benefits the San Diego community.
Amusingly, I think all of the projects that I contribute are cool. OpenHatch, Python, teaching IPython notebook, PyLadies, San Diego Python User Group, requests, and github3.py are nice communities with good people sharing a common interest in software and how it impacts others.
What are you the most proud of?
In life, I am most proud of my relationship with my immediate family.
As it relates to software, coding, and Django, I am most proud of the small moments when a person realizes that it is possible for them to create something using software. Many of these students have been told in the past that they can’t write software or aren’t good enough. So it’s a powerful moment when the person goes from thinking software is something that they can’t do to embracing that it is possible.
What are you curious about?
How things are made. Whether art or a product or software, I frequently ask others how they did it. It’s really cool to see the different ways people use materials and tools to make things.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I love tidepooling and gardening. Music is my hobby. I’m a novice guitar player, and I play with others in a community guitar orchestra. I also love restoring old guitars and other stringed instruments.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Write lots of small 10-20 line programs. Try to make a small contribution to a project that interests you. Share what you know (even if it’s not programming related) with others. Most of all, believe in yourself.
Thanks Carol! :)
