Your Django Story: Meet Anna Schneider
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 Schneider is the CTO of WattTime, a tech nonprofit that cuts the carbon footprint of smart devices. She taught herself Python during her PhD in biophysics, then taught herself Django two years ago while co-founding WattTime.
How did your story with code start?
I got into software development through scientific computing and data analysis. My first lines of code were probably some shell scripts to access the protein structure data I was working on for my undergrad research. I remember writing explanations for “cd”, “ls”, etc in my lab notebook.
When I started my PhD in biophysics at UC Berkeley, I was pretty sure I wanted to join a lab that shot lasers at proteins. Who wouldn’t, right? But I noticed that I kept avoiding the benchwork, and I had much more fun writing Matlab scripts instead. I also wanted to get better at programming to keep my options open for jobs later.
So I decided to join a research group where the tool of choice was code instead of lasers. Scientific computing is weird—most of my fellow grad students didn’t have much programming experience either, but we did have access to one of the top 50 supercomputers in the world! I taught myself Python for data analysis by reading loads of online documentation and StackOverflow. The code snippets included in the numpy, scipy, and scikit-learn docs were lifesavers, and got me started on a path to writing good Pythonic code.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
Depends on how you count it! I only began to feel like a “real programmer” near the end of my PhD, when I started writing Python packages with test suites and sensible object-oriented structure—and that was after more than 5 years of writing code of some sort. Before that, I thought of myself as a scientist who worked on clean energy and photosynthesis, and who just happened to use code to do it.
What do you love the most about coding?
I read this interesting post recently about what kinds of programmers fit well on different teams. In that taxonomy, I feel closest to the “product” and “practical” archetypes: I like solving practical problems in high-level languages, especially if I know the feature will be useful.
Why Django?
Because Python :). Python is the only language where I could have made such a seamless transition from scientist to web developer, while using top-notch modern libraries in both fields.
My first experience with Django was at my first hackathon. That was a pretty great weekend—I met my co-founder, and I met my favorite web framework!
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
At WattTime, our core product is real-time data about the carbon footprint of electricity from the power grid. I’m really passionate about getting our data out in the world because you can save a lot of carbon if you’re able to shift your power usage around even a little bit.
I designed our stack to be Python from the ground up. Our platform is built in Django, with the help of awesome packages like Celery, Django Rest Framework, and Pandas.
What are you most proud of?
I’m proud that I’ve been able to set up a pretty solid workflow for test-driven development and deployment at WattTime. As our only full-time developer, there’s no way I would have been made so much progress so fast without taking the time to learn tools like Pivotal Tracker, Travis CI, Heroku, and New Relic as I went.
What are you curious about?
I’m looking forward to learning more about scaling. We have some bigger Internet of Things brands that we’ll probably start working with soon, so that challenge might come up sooner rather than later!
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I love to create food projects, dance, listen to podcasts, drink fancy cocktails, hike, and hang out with my awesome housemates and their awesome cats.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
If you’re coming to programming from a science background, one amazing resource is Software Carpentry. It’s a volunteer organization specifically aimed at teaching researchers how to write software in a way that encourages reproducible, collaborative science. They run workshops all over the world, and they also have lots of online resources if there’s not a workshop near you.
Thanks Anna!
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!
