Your Django Story: Meet Cea Stapleton
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Cea comes by coding through a pre-teen desire to have her own website and a fascination with Formal Logic. Her experience with academic Philosophy (especially philosophy of language and formal logic) will always influence how she looks at code. She has a BA in Religious Studies (and a BS in Information Science and Technology) and will happily talk your ear off about how a humanities discipline bent on a multiplicity of methodologies both does and doesn’t apply to crafting good software. These days she’s pursuing her masters in Computer Science at UW Madison and applying her consulting-earned skills to a library resource management framework.
How did your story with code start?
With a pre-teen desire to have a website for my online Roleplaying character. No, really. When I was 11 I taught myself CSS and HTML so that I could have a dedicated page to talk about the intricacies of my character’s magical powers, how she might destroy you if you crossed her, and what her house looked like. Since then I’ve always had a web presence of some sort, although thankfully I’ve moved past the need to put my terrible attempts at poetry on the internet (I’ve moved from online Roleplaying to full-fledged Dungeon Master).
I dabbled with PHP from then on, especially with the early versions of Wordpress (that’s my claim to web developer hipster cred: I used Wordpress before it had static pages). In college I went three classes deep into the Mathematics-Computer Science major. I wasn’t prepared for the math but the taste of CS training stuck and I’ve been teaching myself languages and frameworks unabashedly since.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I’ve always thought of myself as a programmer, but before I entered the industry I turned down two top divinity schools because I couldn’t justify spending $200,000 to gain entry into Academia. My first undergraduate degree is in Religious Studies (the second is in Information Science & Technology). I focused primarily on Secular Feminist Biblical interpretation, and my work for my capstone was centered on the naming of Eve in Genesis 1 & 2.
I have a deep and unbinding love of the Humanities, but have settled on CS for my primary focus.
What do you love the most about coding?
Any development project is a logic puzzle, and coding is the ongoing solution. It’s the puzzle-solving that makes me the happiest. Programming provides us with a succinct, clear language of instructions for solving puzzles under a multiplicity of conditions. Designing and writing solutions to logic puzzles engages my brain holistically in a way few other things do. Programming takes logic, creativity, and stubbornness. My brain is challenged when I program, and I love the exhilaration of deep thinking.
Why Django?
Django combines the fantastic community of Python with a beginner-friendly web framework. Web frameworks are very accessible to beginners because they easily get something working and visible. When I started using Django I was a Python beginner. I knew I wanted to start using Python, but I wasn’t sure how. At the time, I was working an a poorly designed PHP application that used a framework that was not suited to the project. I wanted to clean it up and rewrite, but I also wanted to take the opportunity to learn something new. Python had been on my list for quite some time, so it was an easy choice.
After trying it, I’m happy to say that I’ll often choose or recommend Django first. I’m familiar with a fair number of frameworks, but Django is clear, well-documented, and well-supported so I point to it often.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m working on my masters degree in Computer Science, which will hopefully turn into a PhD in Computer Science. I think this is pretty fantastic, although it’s certainly not a narrow or particularly unique project. I’m also working with a few other excellent people to bring Django Girls to Wisconsin!
What are you the most proud of?
I’ve struggled with how to answer this question on multiple occasions, and I’m sure my answer will continue changing each occasion the question is posed to me. Right now, I must say that it’s my transition from Humanities undergrad headed towards Divinity School to CS masters student. It wasn’t something I did easily, and I was aided by a combination of early CS experiences and the right opportunities appearing at the right time. Still, I must take some credit and therefore pride in the fact that I’ve thoroughly shifted gears without immense time in between (~2 years).
What are you curious about?
I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I’ll spare you the diversity of questions that occupy my brain on a daily basis and say succinctly: anything and everything.
Less succinctly: Perhaps the above is a cliche answer, but it feels dishonest to narrow further when one moment I find myself considering whether Shakespeare is potentially the most famous Bisexual of the modern era, the next trying to remember how time dilations work, and then how many different ways I can strip the plastic coating off of my headphones’ jack so they fit through the tiny hole in my phone case.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I listen to probably 1-2 audiobooks a week, depending on their length. I listen while I wash dishes, while I walk places, while I’m on the bus. Most recently they’ve been fantasy novels, but I go through phases. I love to read, and this is the main way I have time to do it.
Most weeks I manage between 10 and 15 miles total running, split between ~3 days. When I can, and when it’s not -15F outside, I swim laps. I’m also an avid swing dancer; my partner and I teach workshops occasionally and attend social dances nearly every week.
I hate leaving out hobbies but I have too many to expand upon them all, so here’s a list of what I didn’t think of first: Dungeon Mastering a weekly tabletop roleplaying game, cosplay, sewing, Real Time Strategy video games, writing, hobby programming, and building computers (I build gaming desktops for my friends occasionally). There are more, but I’ve covered a fairly good taste of the diversity.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Cultivate a healthy amount of stubbornness and apply it directly to programming. I’m not recommending inflexibility, but rather stubbornness that there is at least one solution to the problem you’re trying to solve. That solution may be to rethink the problem and/or change your focus.
Thanks Cea! :)
