Django Girls Winter of Code

It all started with an email from Ola sent on the 11th of December 2014:

“…Django Girls main email account is regularly receiving questions from various companies asking us if we know some Django Girls alumni who might be interested in working for them. On the other hand, we also get questions from our alumni asking us if we know some companies who are looking for junior devs in city X.

[…]

So we’ve decided to build a “jobs” section on our website, where we can post job listings that we endorse and make it easier for employers and Django Girls to find each other!…”

A lot of people replied really enthusiastically about the whole idea and many volunteered to help (17 people in three days ;)). The final team who worked on the Jobs and Meetups section of the website wound up consisting of Marysia Lowas-Rzechonek, Becky Smith, and me, Kasia Siedlarek.

We also received a lot of helpful feedback, content advice and pull requests (thanks to Ania Warzecha, Ola Sitarska, Lacey Williams Henschel!).

The project seemed rather easy at the beginning, but very soon we found a number of problems to solve; some small, some more complicated… We needed to rethink the model schema, decide how to go about the reviewing process, learn about email notifications, learn how to add custom widgets… And so Winter had ended and Spring became Summer. Finally, we decided the time has come.

The outcome is far from perfect, but it works (at least we hope so ;)), so feel free to tell us what should be changed, create an issue or just submit the Pull Request. You can find the code at https://github.com/DjangoGirls/djangogirls in the jobs app.

The new Jobs and Meetups section of the Django Girls website can be found under the Community section (in the footer) - from there you may choose to add a job opportunity, browse through available positions or see if any cool event is coming up in your city. You can also submit a meetup which you are going to attend or organise!

All job opportunities and meetups are reviewed before they are published on Django Girls site (yay!). Anyone wishing to add a job opportunity should remember that we are all about helping beginner programmers gain more knowledge and experience. If you are adding a meetup, workshop or conference, please keep in mind that we require all events on our website to have a published Code of Conduct.

Now from some personal opinions about the whole project:

me (Kasia):

It was great experience to work with Marysia and Becky, since I’ve never really had an opportunity to work on a project with more than one person ;). I feel that I’ve learned a lot and know better what I don’t know. I would surely recommend volunteering for Django Girls, especially for those who went through Django Girls tutorial, are willing to do more and prefer not to work alone ;).

Marysia:

Taking part in the Winter of Code was such a good experience. For me it was a real step forward in thinking like a programmer. When doing just your own projects, you can always change your design, make things easier and stay with things you already know. But working on something together, something you believe in, challenges you to do your best.

With Kasia, we had endless discussions on Slack about various bits of the Community sections, each of us bringing in her own experience and perspective. Sometimes, we spent hours discussing and writing something that we dropped later on. We tried to keep things simple but user-friendly. And Becky was always there, giving us a space to work things out for ourselves but stepping in each time we got stuck or got carried away too much. I would really recommend taking part in such a project to everyone.

Becky:

The Winter of Code has been a fantastic experience for all of us.  Reading through the initial specs, it seemed like a big project for a group of beginner programmers!  As mentor for the group I initially helped with planning and working out what tasks needed to be done and who was best to work on each part.  However, Marysia and Kasia really quickly took ownership of the project and started to drive its progression, and gained confidence in their own coding abilities.  By the last couple of months I really just gave some suggestions in code reviews, and watched it all happen!  I feel privileged to have been involved in the project, and I think it demonstrates that with a willingness to learn, determination and good support from others, amazing things can be achieved!  I hope it will encourage other new developers to take on similar challenges and other organisations to consider offering this sort of opportunity.