Your Django Story: Meet Andromeda Yelton
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
How did your story with code start?
I was working for a startup, wearing a lot of the non-code hats. When we were hiring a contract designer, it came down to the one whose designs we liked better but who couldn’t integrate them into our back end, and the one whose design wasn’t as strong but who could do the coding to integrate it. During the meeting about this I was looking at Django docs and I said, well, I’ve never done this but I think I could, and my boss said that’s good, because we’re hiring the stronger designer and you’re doing the front end work.
Of course, that’s not actually the start. I’d taken a semester of programming required by my university as an undergrad, and I’d dabbled in various languages since childhood, but none of it had ever stuck before I had a project and a deadline.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
Double-majored in math and classics; inexplicably found the latter more marketable, got an MA in classics, and taught Latin to middle school boys. Realized I wasn’t going to do that my whole life, got a library degree with the intention of doing reference and instruction at a university, drifted toward web or systems librarianship during grad school, and then graduated smack into a giant recession, ultimately ending up at the aforementioned startup…
What do you love the most about coding?
Are you asking my right brain, my left brain, or my heart? It’s a tossup among pure problem-solving, building things that empower people to do more stuff in the world (that’s my inner teacher/librarian talking), or turning pure thought into real-world actions.
Why Django?
It was what I needed to know at the time! But it’s turned out to be useful for a variety of projects; it has a good ecosystem of third-party components and nice people. And Python turns out to have been the first programming language I actually really liked using.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I’m a freelancer, so I have a steady diet of new cool stuff.
My long-term gig is CustomFit. My friend Amy Herzog is a knitting pattern designer and she teaches people to modify sweaters to fit their real bodies (not the ones the pattern thinks they’re “supposed” to have); CustomFit wraps that up into code that produces custom knitting patterns around people’s actual measurements. I don’t knit, but I’ve been a part of knitting thousands of sweaters, and I really like working on code that helps people be creative and feel good about their bodies.
Another friend has a Knight Foundation grant to create better building usage analytics options for libraries, using open-source hardware and software, and I’ll be writing the front end for that. So I just got a full Django stack operating on an Intel Edison, which fits cozily in the palm of my hand.
I’m also just about to start on a project for Wikipedia (!). They have a program where active editors can get access to paywalled journals, but the application process for that is spaghetti, and I’m going to write an app to simplify that for them.
What are you most proud of?
The ways my work has helped people be more capable and confident. CustomFit does a lot of that, and I love seeing people wearing their sweaters on Ravelry. I’ve also taught coding workshops and it’s always great to see students go on and do things with their new skills.
What are you curious about?
….everything?
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I’m a freelancer juggling a bunch of clients, a board member of a national library organization, and the mom of an 8-year-old. I don’t think I have free time?
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Find a project and a mentor (or at least some nice people who can answer questions and show you their toolchain).
Programming is full of feels, and that’s okay. You will run into fear, frustration, and failure; that’s normal and doesn’t mean you can’t do this. Part of the process of becoming an experienced programmer is learning tools for handling those feelings: developing faith that you’ll solve the problems. Eventually you will! (But it’s okay to walk away from your computer for a while if you need to.)
Thanks Andromeda! :)
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!
