Your Django Story: Meet Adrienne Lowe
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Anna Ossowski has managed our Your Django Story series for the past year, and has interviewed dozens of badass Django programmers. She’s moving on to other amazing things, and we’d all like to thank her for her hard work!
This week, we’re introducing the newest member of the Your Django Story team, Adrienne Lowe! Adrienne is taking over for Anna, and will be publishing interviews each week with more phenomenal women Django developers. But before she dives in to get started, let’s get to know her!
Adrienne Lowe began coding in 2007 while attending graduate school, and starting learning Python a few years later when she created her blog, Coding With Knives. She’s a volunteer programmer with the online project Letters to My 25 Year Old Self, organized the wildly successful Django Girls Atlanta workshop, and heads up the ATL chapter of PyLadies. You can find her on Twitter.
How did your story with code start?
My story with code started in 2007 when I started to use open source software in my graduate school’s computer lab. Amazingly, we were fully Ubuntu! When I learned more about the philosophy of open source and free software, I knew I wanted to be a part of the story as more than just a user. I thought that writing code might be a way of doing that.
I toyed with the idea of learning Python in the years that followed, but didn’t get serious about it until late 2014, when I started writing at my blog Coding with Knives. Coding with Knives marries my lifelong passion for culinary arts with programming and shows how these disparate subjects can inform one another in compelling ways! I feature a mix of original recipes, reviews of Python materials, and the insider scoop on all the conferences I get to attend.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
When I launched Coding with Knives last year, I had two jobs. My day job was as a fundraising professional with a major university. I worked on a team that was responsive to the fundraising departments of all of the unversity’s schools and “units,” as we called them, and implemented programs for securing annual donations.
In the evenings and on weekends, I taught cooking classes and provided occasional special event catering and personal chef services to families throughout Atlanta. Prior to working at the university, I was a personal chef full time.
What do you love the most about coding?
My favorite thing about coding is how we can bring our wonderfully distinct personalities and life experiences to the activity. Every line of code we write is imbued with our uniqueness and our goals for making something useful for somebody else (and sometimes, just ourselves!).
Why Django?
The community, of course! As a newcomer, I’ve felt incredibly welcomed and supported by everyone I’ve met who is associated with Django in particular. From Django Girls to DEFNA, Django organizations are founded and run by people who deeply care about others and who work hard to help them achieve their goals.
Also: our documentation is super rad.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m really proud, and slightly intimidated, to share that I just joined the (two person!) volunteer development team at Letters to My 25 Year Old Self. Žan Anderle, a kind and brilliant full-stack developer based in Slovenia, invited me to be part of the project after we met at DjangoCon Europe this past May. He started the conversation by asking me what I wanted to get out of the experience as a contributor, and is working carefully to make sure my goals are met. I feel profoundy spoiled and humbled to invited into someone else’s project so warmly, and to be so supported throughout. I hope I can make some meaningful contributions, and soon!
I’m also excited to be speaking at ELA Conf in Philadelphia on November 21. The goal of ELA Conf is to create a safe, supporting, and inspiring community for women to gain the confidence needed to become leaders, speakers, and teachers in the world of tech. I’ll be sharing a few of the things I’ve learned from the experience of speaking at tech conferences in a talk called “Bake the Cookies, Wear the Dress: Bringing Confident Authenticity to your Tech Talk.”
What are you the most proud of?
At the moment, I’m extraordinarily proud to have organized Atlanta’s first Django Girls workshop. Python for women in Atlanta is small, and I am one of the main reasons we have any kind of organized presence. I want to give Atlanta women the world, and being able to make Django Girls happen here was deeply satisfying. For the full report on that event at the Django Girls blog, see the blog post about it.
What are you curious about?
Food! I wish I had something more sophisticated to say, but I’m usually thinking about what I just ate or what I want to cook or eat next. Any time I travel to a new city, I make a wish list of all of the places I want to go and things I want to eat. And at home, I regularly write new recipes and try them out. Please encourage me to share more recipes at Coding with Knives - it is something I know people really enjoy, and I want to get better about it!
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
In addition to cooking, I love hiking in the woods alone or with a friend. I went through a significant life change last year and getting out in the woods was the only thing that helped me truly cope with the difficult things I was experiencing. Now, when I need some quiet, rest, or just a place to be myself, I return to the woods for a hike.
I also organize Atlanta’s PyLadies group, PyLadiesATL. I’m really happy to share that since I came on as a co-organizer this summer, our group has grown by leaps and bounds. We went from not having regular meetings at all, to meeting monthly and attracting increasingly bigger crowds!
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Start asking your scariest, ugliest, weirdest, most terrifying questions – about code! – as soon as possible. Don’t fear that what you’re curious about is too basic, or a waste of time, or something you “should” already know. The sooner you can just spit it out and get it answered, the better it will be for you and everybody else.
Please remember that the folks you ask weren’t born with these answers. They learned them, and you can too. But you must summon the courage to ask! And if the person you’re asking treats you unkindly – if someone EVER makes you feel any less than for asking – don’t deal with them. Share about your experience and find someone who treats you with the respct and kindness you deserve. And it shouldn’t be hard: there are plenty of folks ready to do so in the Django community.
How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?
Organizing a Django Girls workshop was a great way for me to flex a lot of the skills I’ve developed over the years – event planning, fundraising, teaching – to put together a memorable experience for Atlanta’s deserving women. The attendees made it very clear to me how thankful they were for the event. It was just a great way for me to enact my deeply-held value of making programming accessible and inviting for women.
Thanks Adrienne! :)
If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), send an email to story@djangogirls.org!
