Your Django Story: Meet Vivian Guillen

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

Vivian is a full stack developer that likes to make things prettier and more functional. She’s also a bitcoin geek and a Startup Weekend Education Organizer. When she’s not writing code she’s organizing meetings for the Pyladies Santo Domingo Chapter.

 

How did your story with code start?

I have always loved working with computers, I had my first PC at 12 and a year later was already changing the operating system and customizing game emulators to work how I wanted.

A couple of years later I finally got an internet connection and instantly fell in love with the web.

I remember I started freelancing at 16 installing and tweaking Wordpress sites because I wanted to buy myself a new laptop. Fun times!

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I studied Economics in college and briefly worked as an analist at a local NGO before realizing that coding was what I really wanted to do.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

To me, coding is like magic. You can make something out of nothing, it’s like a superpower.

 

Why Django?

Because of the local Python community.

Back when I decided I wanted to work in programming, I attended a meeting of the local Python user group to meet the people of the local developer community and ended up meeting who would be my future cofounder, Leonardo.

Leo introduced me to Django. At that time I have never seen such a complete framework and was delighted at how powerful it was. Furthermore, I found the online community of Django to be very friendly to beginners and the plethora of online tutorials helped me become very comfortable with it.

 

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

I’m currently in the process of starting a new software company called Codetiger.

 

What are you the most proud of?

My curiosity, I’m always reading new things and meeting new people.

 

What are you curious about?

Anything related to bitcoin, to me bitcoin is an incredible breakthrough in the finance industry and will continue to evolve and be an important part of the financial ecosystem of the 21st century.

 

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

My main hobby is reading fantasy novels and playing videogames. I also spend my free time organizing Pyladies Santo Domingo.

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Never try learning many new things at once. Start slow and have clear goals about what you want to achieve by coding. And if you can, try to find a mentor, someone with experience that can help you avoid making the same mistakes over and over again and help you learn faster and better.

Thanks Vivian! :)

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