Your Django Story: Meet Michelle Glauser
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Michelle Glauser is a lover of Python and homemade cookies. She learned to code at Hackbright Academy in 2012 and happily became a software engineer. Michelle is passionate about helping more women join and feel comfortable in tech. When she’s not doing techie things, she enjoys baking (and consuming the goods), burying herself in a book, playing the piano, going on hikes, and watching dogs at a nearby park with her husband. You can find her on Twitter.
How did your story with code start?
I’d been blogging since 2003 and occasionally playing with the HTML and CSS on Blogger, but that was the extent of my coding until a few years ago, when I was working at a small startup in San Francisco. One of my jobs was to post on social media about our product, but I didn’t feel like I was getting new content fast enough from our technical staff. When my boss asked me to come up with a mockup and I did some research on website designs, I started wishing I could build cool websites myself and so I googled “how to build websites.” I attended a couple of free RailsBridge and Rails Girls workshops before signing up for Hackbright Academy, a women-only, Python bootcamp in San Francisco.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I wrote my Master’s thesis on autobiographical acts on the internet, so I was very interested in how we use technology to tell our stories. I was hoping to get into a PhD program to become a professor of digital humanities, but that didn’t pan out, so I was trying to figure out what else interested me when I decided to attend Hackbright Academy. Interestingly, I’d always been interested in computers and technology (I was the only girl in a tech class in high school, and I was the only member of my family who loved to play around with DOS), but I’d just never known what the options were for software engineering careers and had never known how creative, versatile, and rewarding coding could be.
What do you love the most about coding?
What I said above. I love that it’s creative, versatile, and so satisfying when you figure things out.
Why Django?
We used Flask at Hackbright Academy, but I opted to use Django for my final project because it seemed like more companies were using it and I wanted to get a headstart on learning it and be more employable that way. My first job after Hackbright didn’t actually end up being at a company that used Django, but I continued to work on my Django skills.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I haven’t had a lot of time to develop in the last month because I’ve been organizing the #ILookLikeAnEngineer billboard campaign—a fundraiser to show faces of underrepresented engineers to raise awareness and inspiration and normalize non-stereotypical engineers. We had an amazing sold-out event (you can read about it here). I’m also excited about some free classes I’m trying to organize to teach programming to low-income individuals who don’t have their own laptops to bring with them.
What are you the most proud of?
Tough question. I asked my husband, and without any background as to why I was asking, he said, “Your transition to being a web developer.”
What are you curious about?
I’m not really sure how to answer this question. Do you mean as-yet unlearned tech skills, like data visualization? Do you mean what interests me in tech that I already use, like ? Or what interests me besides tech, like modern American literature or languages? Or would my curiosity about where MH370 is suffice? :D
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I like to hike, dog-watch at parks, read novels, and spend time with my husband. I speak German fluently and am learning Mandarin. I also like to travel and have blogged a lot about it.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Don’t get overwhelmed. Break things down into very small, very specific blocks so you can on focus on one thing at a time, at least until you need to jump around while accomplishing things, and then you need to forget about your desire to know everything about each technology you touch. I have an enormous learning-to-code resources spreadsheet that can get pretty scary, so I’m very willing to give advice on which thing to start with and where to go from there.
Thanks Michelle! :)
