Your Django Story: Meet Kinga Kięczkowska
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Kinga is a Django Girls workshop organiser & coach, a novice programmer and a student of Computer Security & Forensics at Edinburgh Napier University. After hours, she likes to unwind with an Oliver Sacks’ book and a surprisingly diversified playlist.
How did your story with code start?
I started in middle school - HTML, CSS, these kinds of things. Later on, in high school, I learnt some basic algorithms and how to (clumsily) implement them in Ruby. Now I’m studying Computer Security & Forensics at university, and yet still feel that my story with coding is only starting.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
Going into computing was probably the first serious career plan I made.
What do you love the most about coding?
I like the feeling that proves to be true in most programming problems - that however big and complicated the task seems to be, it can always be divided into smaller chunks to deal with. The most enjoyable thing ever for me is to make up an algorithm which solves a given problem, and then implement it in whatever language. When it works, I’m in heaven :)
How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?
I met like-minded people and was able to build a network of support in my programming endeavours. Since then I always have someone to ask or brainstorm with. I also learnt that not knowing everything isn’t a bad thing, and that most of the people aren’t exactly sure what they are doing either - just like me. And of course, I’ve made friends within the Django Girls community!
Why Django?
My involvement with Django is limited to Django Girls. I got involved with it because of all the amazing people I met during Django Girls Berlin, where I was an attendee. I liked the community and the idea of working towards bringing more women into programming - suddenly I realised there’s really not many women around there. Django Girls seemed to have the perfect recipe for it. I’m very glad I got to organise two events with the help of great people I met due to Django Girls.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Currently I’m helping with PyCon US 2016 by reviewing the talks in the Program Committee and will be co-chairing Open Spaces. I’m really thrilled about working on OpenSpaces as I believe they are the place where most discussions and new ideas are born, as it’s the least “moderated” part of a conference. I’m also very eager on providing safe spaces for people in tech and I believe open spaces might serve as those, too.
I’m also working on a more long term project, which is getting an undergraduate degree in Computer Security & Forensics. Who knows where this is gonna take me :)
What are you curious about?
Recently, following the things I’m learning at university, I’m becoming more and more interested in the hardware side of things. I’d like to explore the theory I study in practice, so am currently saving up for a Raspberry Pi or Arduino starter kit. Any recommendations?
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I enjoy playing cards and scrabble (but dislike any other board games deeply!), as well as reading. On top of everything I love travelling.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
It may be an unpopular opinion, but my advice is - follow some kind of tutorial, at least at the beginning! It’s good to have all the basics in place before moving on to free exploration of the ever changing programming world. Don’t disregard some basic theoretical knowledge, which might not appear useful at first, such as data types and later data structures. It does help to know these things!
Also, don’t get attached to one programming language - they change a lot, and they change fast. Aim to learn how to think computationally, read around about algorithm design and things like this. If you learn how to think like a programmer, you’ll be able to adapt to new technologies faster and in a much less stressful manner.
Thanks a lot Kinga! :)
