Your Django Story: Meet Katie Bell
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Katie Bell is a developer at Grok Learning, where she’s been doing a combination of things since joining the team in March 2015. She builds new components of the learning platform and also writes course content. Grok Learning provides programming and web development courses to be used in schools. Before Katie moved back to Sydney to join Grok, she was a Site Reliability Engineer at Google in Switzerland, working on storage systems.
How did your story with code start?
I was lucky enough to go to a school which not only taught coding (as part of an optional subject) but also taught it well. I elected to take that subject even though I thought it would be boring because I didn’t know much about computers and I always felt like I was a late adopter of new technology. The subject was indeed mostly boring, but the little bits of coding we did were addictive. :)
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
There isn’t really a before time, I started in high school and went straight into a computer science program at university. I was interested in film, spaceships and physics before I discovered coding.
What do you love the most about coding?
If you write the same program that has been written before, then you’re doing it wrong. Since code should be reusable you should always be writing something that’s new. I love that everything I do is a new challenge and that it’s part of my job to avoid repetitive and boring work.
Why Django?
The short answer is because it’s what I use at work. The Grok Learning platform is built on Django and it’s served us well for many years. Django keeps developing and improving over time and benefits from having a massive user base behind it for finding bugs and adding useful features.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Well, some of the most fun things I’m working on are secret Grok projects that aren’t launched yet so I can’t talk about them. I do have a side project of a Python API for Minecraft which I built and continue to develop – that’s pretty fun. :)
What are you most proud of?
There isn’t one specific event or accomplishment that I’m proud of above all others, so I just can’t choose. As someone who grew up being very cautions and only trying things if I thought I would succeed, I suppose I’m most proud of myself when I attempt to do things that are too hard or try to push myself outside of what I’m comfortable with. Regardless of whether I succeed or not, I’m proud that I’m pushing myself a lot harder than I used to and I’m learning and growing from it.
What are you curious about?
Pretty much everything! Though in particular at the moment I’m looking at how to write games in various forms. Mostly I’m learning about 2D retro style games using the cross-platform Unity game platform and looking at various Javascript game engines.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I used to have hobbies before I started working at a startup. I still find the time to teach at the Girls Programming Network (GPN), continue learning German, swim and play squash, I just don’t have time to play computer games anymore. I’m also working on extending my cooking and baking skills. Six years enjoying the free food at Google meant I never really learned how to cook. :)
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
As you learn, always keep challenging yourself with a new language, or a new type of software. The goal is not to learn how to write one kind of program really well, the goal is to be able to write any program you want – even when at first you have no clue how to start it.
Thank you so much, Katie!
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!
