Your Django Story: Meet Jessamyn Smith
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Jessamyn Smith is an experienced full-stack software developer with over a decade in the field, primarily in back-end development for web applications. Her specialties are debugging, software design, refactoring legacy code, adding automated tests, and automating builds and deployments. She is a licensed professional engineer with a degree in Computer Engineering. She’s also Interim CTO at Ziversity.com, an organization that offers women, LGBTQ people, racial/ethnic minorities, Indigenous peoples, and persons with (dis)abilities a safe space to embrace their identity and add context to their experiences. Jessamyn is also a frequent mentor and occasional instructor at Ladies Learning Code.
How did your story with code start?
My first experience was Logo in elementary school and I didn’t like it at all. I found it very tedious, and when I found out there was a repeat command and I’d been drawing shapes by typing in the forward x left y commands I felt so betrayed I stopped doing the programming part of the library curriculum.
I found programing again quite by chance. I was depressed and working a low-paid dead-end job when I decided to start interviewing everyone I met about their jobs. I was at the Legion with my boyfriend at the time when I met an older gentleman whose job sounded amazing. He had a Ph.D. in Engineering and worked a couple days a week as a consultant in the oil patch, making great money. That started me researching engineering. This was the old days so I went down to Human Resources Canada and read through the binders about different jobs. I was surprised I hadn’t considered engineering before: as a practical person who liked math and science it seemed a natural fit. I’ve always wondered if the mass murder of women engineers at École Polytechnique de Montréal when I was just 13 frightened me off.
Originally I planned to be a Chemical Engineer, but a trip to a processing plant quickly dispelled that notion. I loved the first year programming class; finally, I could make the computer bend to my will! I took to programming quite naturally. I was so insecure at the time that if I hadn’t seen that I was better at programming than most of my classmates, I probably wouldn’t have tried to pursue it. My boyfriend went away one weekend and when he came back I’d made a Mastermind game in Turbo Pascal, learning to program by reading the help.
Interestingly, in second year I found some of my papers from Grade 7, and I’d written than when I grew up I wanted to be a “computer mechanic”. I suppose with my blue collar background I figured there had to be people who fixed computers, just as there were people who fixed cars. My interest was probably mostly due to the games Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail. Also, I was a very serious child, much concerned about the future, and already news articles were appearing about the burgeoning importance of computers.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was a short-order and prep cook for several years after high school. I’ve also worked as a farm labourer, market gardener, construction labourer, and babysitter.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love the power to create something from nothing, particularly when it’s something that makes people’s lives better. I am so committed to teaching programming because I want to put that power into everyone’s hands. I want to see what amazing tools people will create!
Why Django?
I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, and I love that with Django, most of the important basics are built-in, and most of the addons you can imagine have been created and open-sourced already. Django also has broadly sensible defaults and encourages you toward a good project structure while still being flexible. I find the Django community very friendly and welcoming, and that is important to me. I spend a lot of time in #django on IRC, helping when I can. I am continually impressed by the number of kind, intelligent people in the channel.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I just finished developing the initial release of Ziversity.com, an online platform to help connect diverse candidates with the companies who want them. I often hear from tech companies they want to hire more diverse people and don’t know where to find them, so I hope this will help.
I continue to be very happy about my work on codementor.io, where I teach people around the world about coding and good developing practices.
I am also proud to be a mentor and occasional instructor at Ladies Learning Code.
What are you most proud of?
It’s a few years old now, but I am still very proud of my talkbackbot. It has inspired so many people to engage with everyday sexism in a different way.
What are you curious about?
I am pretty curious about life in general. Right now, I am particularly interested to see what humanity is going to do with technology in the next 10 years. We face grave environmental challenges, and while it might already be too late, I still have hope that we can address those challenges.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I like to garden and walk my dogs. I also cook most of my own food, and I delight in doing it well. I still play video games from time to time, though not as much as I used to. These days I find I am spending a lot of spare time on my myriad open source projects, like a menstrual tracker and my various twitter bots, including @heartbotapp on twitter.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
I have many thoughts! I captured most of them pretty well on Twitter in a Codementor live chat. Check it out here.
Some of the things I share include:
Don’t be afraid to try things and experiment. You never know what you’ll learn!
Learn to write unit tests. You’ll save yourself so much time and mental strain. Your code will be better.
Learning to use a debugger is an excellent use of your time. You can go cli with pdb or visual with PyCharm.
Mostly I just wish I could give past me a big hug and tell her it’ll be okay, you’ll learn and life will be good.
Thanks Jessamyn! :)
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!
