Your Django Story: Meet Heather Bryant

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

 

Heather Bryant is director of Project Facet, an open source journalism software project that’s working to streamline the editorial process and help newsrooms collaborate.

How did your story with code start?

When I first got involved in journalism I was very much fascinated with the process and the tools of doing journalism. I spent most of my career on the digital side, building media websites and editorial products and I reached a certain point where I felt like I had reached a limit in what I was able to learn on my own. I was accepted into Hackbright Academy last year and that’s where my introduction to Python began.

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

Well, my original plan for life was that I was going to save all the animals and so I went to school for wildlife biology and studied for about 3 years before I discovered how much I loved journalism. It was a natural progression from being a digital journalist working on media websites to being a programmer.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

At any given time I have about a dozen ideas falling out of my brain for things I want to exist. Coding gives me the power to make those ideas real without having to wait for someone else to do it.

 

Why Django?

I learned programming through Python. When I was working out how to build Facet, Django quickly became a frontrunner as a framework best suited to what I am trying to accomplish. I also appreciate the symmetry in that Django was born in a newsroom and this project is for newsrooms.

 

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

My life is all Facet all the time right now but in the best way. Much of my journalism career has been spent in small newsrooms in Alaska. These are fascinating places covering incredible stories. Alaska is a vast state, but like many news organizations, the newsrooms there do their work with small teams and small budgets.

It’s entirely common to go from covering stories about dog sled racing to military training exercises to scientific research, politics or the vibrant art scene all in the same week. And just as common to be one of few people in a newsroom responsible for covering those stories across thousands of square miles. This experience really informed my idea for Facet. But it’s not just geographic distance that makes collaboration essential for the success of small newsrooms. It’s a necessity everywhere.

Small newsrooms don’t have the technical resources to build their own tools and technologies to help them do their jobs. Most newsrooms use an complex system of third­party tools to manage the process. This means few newsrooms have the same system. And while they need to be able to collaborate and many want to, the sheer variety in editorial workflows and those varied toolsets make collaboration a tricky process. Facet is the common tool that gets out of the way and help newsrooms do the work they need to do.

Facet started coming to life shortly after I graduated Hackbright Academy and joined the education team there. In July, I received a grant to continue the work from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Prototype Fund.

 

What are you most proud of?

I’m thoroughly enjoying the process of running and coding a passion project and watching it develop into a funded open source project. It’s a very fulfilling and rewarding process. I’m proud that I followed through with my idea instead of just saying “gee, it would nice if this tool existed.” I applied for grants without much expectation at all. It’s very easy to write off such a thing as luck or good timing and reminding myself that’s just imposter syndrome speaking is a regular thing. Facet might turn out to be a thing I make and release into the world, or it could very well turn into my career. Either way I’m excited to see where it goes.

 

What are you curious about?

I’m fascinated by the future of algorithmically generated news and contextually aware news. I want to make sure that’s it not just large newsrooms with developers on staff that have access to the tools to do this kind of storytelling, but that small, rural and other non­metro newsrooms also have tools to do groundbreaking local journalism in service of their communities.

 

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

When I’m not behind a computer, I love picking up my camera and putting my photojournalism background to use. I can also easily kill hours on videogames or playing with design in Photoshop or Illustrator.

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

There will be so many times when you have an error or a bug of some sort that just stumps you. That is not an indicator of whether or not you will be a successful programmer. Everyone has those days. How you handle it is what will determine your success as a programmer. You will definitely have days where you will have no idea what’s going on. That’s completely okay. You don’t have know everything, you just have to be open to learning anything.

It’s easy to fall into the cycle of eternal preparation before doing.

“If I take one more online course, or I do one more hackathon then I can start to make this cool thing…”

No.

Start making that cool thing right now. Don’t get caught up so much in planning that you never do the thing you wanted to do in the first place.

 

How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?

I loved the supportive nature of the DjangoGirls workshop. It was very much a judgement free place where it was okay to make mistakes or break code and learn from it. I’m very glad to be a part of the Django community and look forward to the opportunity to mentor at a future DjangoGirls workshop.

 

Thank you so much, Heather!

 

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!

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