Your Django Story: Meet Lacey Williams Henschel

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Lacey is a Python/Django developer with the University of Texas at Austin, but she telecommutes from Portland, Oregon. She’s currently working on organizing the first Django Girls workshop in Portland, and in the meantime is getting to know her fellow PyLadies in the Pacific Northwest. You can reach her on Twitter @laceynwilliams.

 

How did your story with code start?

When I was in grad school pursuing a master’s in English, I took a workshop in TEI, an XML language used to represent manuscripts and archival texts in a digital form. I wound up finishing my degree and getting a Digital Humanities certificate along the way, then applying to the University of Texas’s Software Developer Training program, which is like a dev bootcamp where they pay to teach you Python, Django, and a mainframe language (UT Austin is still on a mainframe, but we’re working on moving off!)

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was an English student looking to get a PhD and become an English professor. Writing code is a surprisingly natural extension of this work. My exposure to feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and ethnic studies makes me a better and more empathetic programmer.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

I love that I get paid to solve puzzles all day. Sometimes the puzzles are simple and only take a couple of hours; sometimes they are more complex and I get to work with a team of smart people for several days or weeks to solve them. Since I work in a university, I also love that most of my work is geared toward making the lives of administrative personnel, faculty, and students easier.

 

Why Django?

Although I didn’t choose Django so much as my employers did, I love working with Django. The community is friendly to newbies and constantly working to be more diverse; the resources to learn and grow with Django are rich and wonderful; and the PyLadies and Django Girls organizations mean there is a lot of support for a woman Django developer who wants to learn and teach.

 

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I’m working with my friend Kenneth Love of Treehouse on putting together a Django Girls workshop in Portland, OR. I’m also developing a Django course (more details on that later… watch my Twitter feed!)

 

What are you the most proud of?

I’m proud that I’m a part of so many aspects of developerhood. I’m a programmer, but still both a student and a teacher. I know that I’m a role model for the women I’ve helped teach at the University of Texas, and I’m so proud of that.

 

What are you curious about?

I’m curious about contributing to an open source project. I’d like to make that my goal for the next year– to tinker with open source in some way.

 

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I love to bake. I was recently gifted a sourdough, started and I am obsessed with feeding it and making things from it. I also do yoga, hike (Portland is great for urban hiking), read, and am part of a young adult literature book club. Portland is the craft brewery capital of the world, so there’s that!

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Keep trying! Everyone learns differently, so if one tutorial doesn’t make sense to you, find another one. Ask a friend to help you. Find a local meetup or workshop. Search for a YouTube video. Sign up for a free trial on an online learning site. It may take awhile to figure out how you best learn, so be patient with yourself.

Thanks Lacey! :)

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