Your Django Story: Meet Emily Manders
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Emily came to web development after a previous career in software project management and UX design and research. Before becoming an engineer, she designed IVR systems for clinical trials, taught Python to beginners, presented at CHI, led workshops on Lean User Research methods, and studied CAD users in Japan. After falling in love with coding in grad school, she knew that software development was the career for her. In 2014, she made the transition to web development full-time and has never looked back. Emily works at Prezi where the product helps people teach and inspire others. In her free time, Emily enjoys cooking, yoga, and reading post-apocalyptic science fiction.
How did your story with code start?
My journey to software development started after college when I was working as a project manager for a boutique software development agency. The company built automated phone trees to randomize patients in clinical trials, and I was fascinated to see all of the wacky ways the callers would try to use and abuse the systems. I thought that there must be a better process for building software that people actually use in the real world, so I applied and was accepted to the Master of Information Management and Systems program at UC Berkeley School of Information. A distributed systems class my first semester used Python to teach us computer science concepts, and it was hands down my favorite class. I actually enjoyed doing the homework! A few years after grad school, I successfully made the jump to software engineering full-time by being selected to attend Hackbright Academy, a coding bootcamp for women in San Francisco.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
Before becoming a programmer, I worked as a project manager, UX designer, and UX Researcher. After graduate school, I didn’t start working as a programmer right away. I needed to keep taking classes on my own while I was working full-time to pay the bills.
What do you love the most about coding?
So many things. I think what I love the most is that you can create something that didn’t exist before in a medium that also allows you to show other people what you’ve made very easily.
Why Django?
I currently work mostly on the front end, and Django provides great templating support for internationalization (very important if you’re going to have a truly global product). The Django documentation is also fantastic, very detailed and well maintained.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m currently planning a Django Girls workshop to introduce more women to programming, Python, and Django! Learning how to code was challenging for me, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my classmates, the undergraduate CS honor society tutors, and great professors for patiently answering my questions.
What are you the most proud of?
Every time I learn how to do something new, that is probably the thing I am most proud of. Learning to be autodidactic, persistent, and patient are probably going to turn out to be the most valuable skills I’ve learned when I look back on my career.
What are you curious about?
Right now I’m most curious about JavaScript. I just picked up Learning JavaScript Design Patterns by Addy Osmani so that I can write better JS.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
In my free time I like to practice yoga, play video games, try new restaurants, and read post apocalyptic science fiction. I also love cleaning out and donating clothes and physical objects that I don’t use regularly. It just makes me feel so much psychologically lighter. My goal is to have a tastefully edited and carefully curated home.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Learning how to program is unlike anything else I had encountered previously in life. It required an entirely different way of thinking about the world—as data, patterns, variables, and repeatable processes. It was a lot to wrap my brain around, and there is still so much that I do not know. It took five years before I successfully transitioned to being a software developer, but knowing that this was how I wanted to spend my professional time and being persistent paid off. The only person who has to believe that you can learn how to code is you. You can do it!
Thanks Emily! :)
