Your Django Story: Meet K. Rain Leander
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
K. Rain Leander is a systematic, slightly psychic, interdisciplinary developer evangelist with a Bachelor’s in dance and a Master’s in IT. An epic public speaker, she has disappeared within a box stuffed with swords, created life, and went skydiving with the Queen. Seriously. Rain is an active technical contributor with RDO manager, OpenStack, Django Girls, and Project DO. Come say hello. Bring cake.
How did your story with code start?
My first computer was a TI-99/4A, a clunky keyboard thing you connected to a television to program BASIC. I followed the instruction manual it came with to build a little dancing robot graphic. It was awesome until I figured out you couldn’t do anything else with it. Years later it wasn’t a big deal to teach myself HTML / CSS / javascript / PHP when I wanted to supplement my dance career with web development. I ended up getting a Master’s in IT and becoming a support engineer after retiring from dance.
But.
How did my most recent story with code continue? I opted to switch to part time after giving birth to my son, but the job I had wasn’t allowed to be part time so my job became to find any (part-time) job within the company. While looking, I attended a Django Girls and LOVED it. It reminded me how much I loved coding and the job search for anything part time became a job search for anything code related.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
See, that’s a tough question because I always considered myself a programmer at heart. I love math and puzzles and logic and languages and often applied the scientific method to resolving obstacles. Now what have I done besides programming? That’s a fun question. I have been a cashier, a babysitter, a waitress, a barista, a magician’s assistant, a dancer / choreographer / artistic director, a teacher, a sales assistant, and a receptionist.
What do you love the most about coding?
It’s weird, I realize, but I love finding bugs. When it’s broken and you figure out how to fix it? That’s the best. I mean, it’s also awesome to make things, sure, but squishing bugs is my schtick.
Why Django?
Luck! When I was looking for work, I saw the Django Girls talk at DevConf.cz 2015 which led to googling Django Girls which led to finding the Django Girls workshop in Groningen where I live. I’ll go into this more in a minute.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
During the day, I’m helping build a new quickstart for RDO which is Red Hat’s version of OpenStack TripleO project to make it easier for developers to build their own simple cloud. This will also make it simpler for people to join the TripleO, OpenStack, and RDO communities because they’ll be able to build their own clouds and start coding right away. You can join the open source project on GitHub and I’m also giving talks about it at DevConf.cz, RDO Community day at FOSDEM, and the Virtualization and IaaS room at FOSDEM.
At night I’m working on Project DO which is an idea born and bred during StartUp Weekend Groningen 2015. It’s about leveraging knowledge, community, and coaching to define, refine, plan, and DO projects that you haven’t done yet. 1. What is your goal? 2. What is your timeline? 3. Why do you want to do it? Answering these three simple questions may seem easy, but finding the underlying motivation behind a goal is the key to making it a reality. This is something that I’ve worked with several of my friends to complete career or education goals, but I’d like to start an open source community so that someday a stranger will say, “Ah, yes, I accomplished XYZ via Project DO.”
What are you most proud of?
My son.
What are you curious about?
What motivates people. How can I help you help yourself. Why is climate change still a debate in some first world countries. How can I break my addiction to sugar. Who let the dogs out. Why does my cat LOVE it when we watch her eat. How can I improve. How can I help others improve. What are the next steps. Did the spinning top fall over at the end of the movie Inception. Why don’t I have a million dollars in my bank account. How can I make the world a better place. How will I be remembered. If it takes half a chicken half a day to lay half an egg, how long does it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle. Everything.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
Swim lessons with my son, reading mostly sci fi / fantasy / fitness / culinary, inhaling anything Doctor Who related, baking scones / cookies / cake, strength training / long walks / yin yoga, daily writing on 750words.com, and working on speaking and leadership skills with Toastmasters.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Two things!
First, learn to google. Finding your own answer is key to being a successful developer, imho. Although, figuring out when to ask others for help is also very important. But, still, learn to google.
Second, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I heard this at some workshop at some point and it really resonated with me. One of the reasons why children are so good at learning things is that they aren’t embarrassed when they make mistakes, they just get back up and try again. Adults have a stumbling block of “feeling stupid” or “looking silly” - give yourself permission to make a mess, learn from it, and progress.
How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?
If I hadn’t attended that Django Girls workshop, I might’ve still ended up where I am, but it might’ve taken longer. Going to that workshop focused the job search and I ended up as the RDO Manager community developer / software engineer with the OpenStack infrastructure team at Red Hat. The first workshop reminded me that I loved to program and shifted my career search as I mentioned before - I attended as a participant because I had zero experience with the django and python languages and while I had extensive programming experience, it was several years old. A few of the chapters from the tutorial were refreshers, like the git, command line, code editor, and HTML chapters, but a few were completely new like the python and django chapters and I had never deployed to heroku which was what we were working with at the time of my first workshop.
I attended the next Django Girls Groningen workshop as a coach, which was awesome, and pretty much amounted to answering questions, helping my coachees go through the tutorial, tweeting and blogging, and helping them google and troubleshoot things when we didn’t know or couldn’t find the answer within the tutorial. I’m attending another Django Girls as a coach, but this time in Den Hague in February and helping plan the next Django Girls Groningen workshop and I hope you can make it!
Thank you so much, Rain!
If you would like to suggest someone to be featured in the Your Django Story series (or would like to nominate yourself!), please email us at story@djangogirls.org.
