Your Django Story: Meet Naomi Ceder

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

Naomi Ceder is the co-founder of Trans*Code, a hackday and coding education event in the UK focussed on the transgender community. She is also author of the Quick Python Book, 2nd Ed, and has taught and spoken about Python to diverse audiences for many years. She was the originator of the PyCon North America poster session, Education summit, and Intro to Sprinting Workshop. Naomi is currently Lead Architect for RazorOccam/Zoro Tools Europe.

 

How did your story with code start?

I am a classicist by training, with a PhD in Latin and Ancient Greek. I was teaching in Greece when I started coding on the Apple II series of computers (yes, I am that old). I guess I just have a thing for funny languages, because by the mid 90’s I had switched from teaching Latin to teaching C and Pascal.

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I taught Latin and Ancient History, occasionally Greek. I was at a small private school, and when it turned out I could also manage computers and write code, I ended up doing that more and more. I ended up teaching coding, writing code, and managing hardware, networks, even the phone system.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

What I love most is the process of understanding a real-world problem and the systems involved, and then creating and combining elements to create a solution. Each system, each coding language, each environment has it’s own possibilities and limitations, so arriving at a solution involves choosing and fitting together the right bits, and creating the code to make those connections. I find that endlessly fascinating.

 

Why Django?

Django was appealing for a number of reasons. I first became a regular user when at work I needed to provide a way to edit product information in a MySQL database. The Django admin tool got me most of the way to an acceptable solution very quickly. But I then started a move to port our existing ecommerce site from a proprietary framework to Django, which they still use. Django has such a strong community and such good documentation that it really made sense as a choice for our business.

 

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

In the next months I will be helping to stand up a third new business, from scratch, in five years. That will be more systems and architecture work than coding, but it should be interesting.

 

What are you the most proud of?

Well, I once wrote a 10 line script that saved our company from shutting down for several days. And I did it with several hours to spare. ;-)

But seriously, what I’m proudest of are the things I’ve done to bring people into coding and the Python community. In 2014 I met three of my former students at PyCon, all in successful software careers. The things I’ve started at PyCon, like the poster session, education summit, and sprints tutorial, which have helped people connect with the community. And most recently, Trans*Code. Those are the things that make me happy.

 

What are you curious about?

Hmmm… Angular, NodeJS, and clojure. Why we humans think and do the things we do, both personally and in general. How to help people better learn and teach things like Python coding. Different cultures. How just about anything works.

 

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

At various times I’ve been into running, biking, and training dogs for competitive obedience trials. At the present I’d say my main hobbies are counted cross stitch and knitting. I think it’s a very telling symptom of the misogyny in the world that traditionally feminine crafts like that are not taken very seriously, when in fact they require more sophisticated mental pattern manipulation and concentration than most things.

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Keep in mind that NONE of this coding stuff is really obvious. Those of us who now appear to understand it have faced similar struggles and made similar mistakes. Nor do we understand everything as completely as you think we do.

So you can do this, but it may take time, and it won’t always be easy. Stay with it and find as much support as you can, from teachers, mentors, friends, even a rubber duck if you have to.

If you’re not getting something, or if you’re making wrong assumptions, the fault is not yours, but in the way the material is being presented, the sequence, even that something’s missing. If people give you the impression that you are not capable of “getting” coding, the fault is theirs - find different people.

Thanks Naomi! :)

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