Your Django Story: Meet Lynn Asiimwe
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Lynn is a software developer at access mobile in Kampala, Uganda and also runs weekly Python/Django classes at outbox incubation hub under the Women Passion Programme. She has a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Cape town, South Africa. Lynn also had the opportunity to work with the Praekelt consulting software team in Cape town, South Africa.
How did your story with code start?
My story with code started when I “accidentally” took a computer science class in my first year of university. This one computer science class led to another and I ended up completing the entire computer science syllabus.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I initially wanted to be an electrical engineer. The reason for taking on programming rather than electrical engineering was because the problems I could solve navigated a variety of spaces including electrical engineering and also I could work on these problems with only the aid of my laptop.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love problem solving. I was a huge math geek in high school much as the problems were exciting, all the problems I did ended on paper. Unlike my math problems, coding allows me to solve problems that might change people’s lives. Coding also allows me to easily contribute to new things that are being created in the universe. I’m not sure any other discipline gives that much freedom.
Why Django?
While at university I took on an internship with a software company called Praekelt. At Praekelt many of the developers were Python enthusiasts. The Praekelt team was aware I had no experience in coding outside of academia and introduced me to Python and later on Django. I found Python and Django easy to grasp with a great online and offline community.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Currently at the company I work for, messaging is the core of our company. We decided to adopt certain Python open source technologies (for example vumi) to make our messaging more robust and scalable. This has given me the opportunity to do a deep dive into Python and Django and push the limit on my problem solving skills.
What are you the most proud of?
I’m most proud of the work I’m doing with the Women Passion Programme. The Women Passion programme is technical programme at a local incubation hub (outbox) that seeks to increase the number of women involved in our technical community in Uganda. I think writing code is easy, however teaching people how to write code is more complex. I believe if we can teach as many diverse people as we can how to code, we can increase the set of problems we can solve by a large margin.
What are you curious about?
I’m curious about learning and inclusion. Learning in the sense of how problems are represented and later on solved. Inclusion in the sense of how to pull a diverse set of people to work together. If a community can master those two concepts the problems a community can tackle increases by a large margin.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
Jogging is currently what I like to do in my free time. I do a lot heavy lifting with my mind, I should do the same with my body so that both are at par. My hobbies vary from year to year this year I’m into meditation last year it was photography .
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Just do it! Its going to feel like riding like a bike, you’re going to fall several time and get lots of bruises. However with a number of tries (more like years) you get the hang of it.
Thanks Lynn! :)
