Your Django Story: Meet Claudia Vicol
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Claudia works as a software engineer at Marktplaats.nl, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Marktplaats.nl is the biggest classifieds website in the Netherlands and part of the eBay Classifieds Group. Claudia currently codes in Scala and Java, and uses Python for testing API’s and for development tooling. She comes from Romania, where she lived until she finished her Computer Science degree at university. Claudia moved to the Netherlands to join her husband. They love playing World of Warcraft as a team.
How did your story with code start?
It started really early on, when I was about 12. I was spending a lot of time with my uncle and two cousins. In order to keep us occupied in the summer vacation my uncle was giving us small visual tasks, like drawing geometric shapes, and we were supposed to draw them using Basic, on a really old Russian computer that you would connect to the TV. Since I enjoyed that a lot I decided to go to a informatics high school, where I learned programming and algorithms.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was studying maths and physics because I dreamt of becoming an astronaut. But when I had to choose my highschool major I chose informatics because it was more exciting.
What do you love the most about coding?
In coding you always get what you are asking the program to do. In that respect the computer is always right when you get a bug, because it was you that coded that mistake in. I like this kind of assurance, that I can fix anything because it is always something I did, or something I forgot to ask the program to do. Not many careers have this kind of certainty. On the other side of coding I love the interactions with other people in my team and the brainstorming and the creativity that goes with any project I try.
Why Django?
I started Django with the goal of being the easiest thing I can teach my husband so he can code his own websites without asking me all the time. I already was using Python at work for all the deploy tools and other tooling, and I knew it was a straightforward programming language. It turns out that it is easy to get started with web programming and have everything deployed in no time.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Currently I am working at Marktplaats.nl the biggest classifieds site in the Netherlands. In my team, we use a lean approach to our development where we create experiments that aim to improve the search experience on the site or our mobile platform, and then measure the effects of the change and decide whether an idea is worth fully implementing. Thus I concentrate mostly on search algorithms. Our main languages are Scala and Java, but we use Python for tooling and API testing.
In the near future, outside of work, I will start posting on my Youtube channel again about programming, I did a test run last year with 10 videos about Scala and so far people are watching it. I am planning to expand my tutorials with more programming languages and fun problems to solve.
For anyone interested that is https://www.youtube.com/user/Aryepilith/videos
What are you the most proud of?
I taught a course of a few months to my colleagues on learning the Scala programming language. I am really proud of the adoption of the language, and that I could teach and share my knowledge with others.
What are you curious about?
How the mind works when making decisions, what makes people make their choice in their online journey. The psychology of engaging users, and keeping them interested in my projects.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I do paper crafting and water coloring in my spare time. I love creating videos on how I did a particular technique and sharing those with the world.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Start typing, don’t waste too much time thinking about it, you will never get it right the first time and you cannot think the entire program through in your mind anyway. Just do small steps that can be tested. So probably learn unit testing and test driven development. Always start with the happy flow, make that one work and then think about all exceptional cases. It will slow you down if you think about all the ways you can possibly fail first.
Thanks Claudia! :)
