Your Django Story: Anastasia Panchenko
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Anastasia Panchenko is from Kiev, Ukraine. She moved to the US about a year ago to work at the National Institutes of Health as a Python/Django developer.
How did your story with code start?
I think it took quite a long time for me to understand that I can do programming.
I’ve liked math for as long as I can remember. But after high school, I decided that doing math alone would take me too far from the “real world”. So I chose the combination of physics and math as my college specialization.
The fun part is that I was a big nerd, and had the highest grades for all the classes… except one: programming (we studied C/C++ in college)! When that happened, I decided that I was definitely not a programmer and tried to find myself in other areas.
I spent three years changing jobs pretty often, but none satisfied me. I was desperate and had run out of ideas. And then a college friend called me for an interview for Samsung in Ukraine.
The job itself was quite open-ended; the main purpose of the team was to help the working process of other teams improve. I saw it as a a huge field for flight of fancy, since we could use any tools we wanted.
Lucky for me, we happened to choose Django for one of our projects. When I first encountered Python, I thought it was the most accessible language I could ever find. Even after a few days of learning, you can write almost anything you want! I was excited by what I could do: and so my programming story began. :)
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I’ve tried all kinds of jobs, including fabric seller, office administrator, content manager, private tutor of physics and math, and teacher of programming basics.
What do you love the most about coding?
I always liked the idea that you can automate boring things which you have to do on computer. For me programming is an art. You can create things. I enjoy well-written, efficient, and clean code. I love that you can solve all the tasks in the world doing programming. It’s like a math, but it’s not abstract, it’s real.
Why Django?
I’ve tried several web frameworks. My first one was Drupal, uugh. I wrote some applications in Flask and I enjoyed it. But my favorite was always Django. I think it’s because of the big community, plenty of great written documentation, thousands of third-party libraries and of course people like myself who love Django as much as I do :)
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
What I’m working on now for work, I unfortunately can’t really talk about in detail! But, in general, most of my work is on Python libraries and web sites for internal usage. A lot of them are very interesting and I’m very happy when I see that what I’ve created helps other people.
What are you most proud of?
The project I’m proud of is my personal blog, which I’ve created from scratch with Django. It’s not perfect by any means but I’ve implemented a lot of features there which I couldn’t find on other blog resources. It also contains ‘tasks’ section so people can post interesting tasks there and solutions for them.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I have a lot of hobbies: traveling, biking, hiking through the mountains, ping-pong, reading, embroidery, sewing, seed beading, playing piano. Sometimes I regret that there are just two days in a weekend :)
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
I have spoken with a lot of beginners and almost all of them have the same problems: they don’t know how to start.
If you consider yourself someone who is having a hard time getting started, I have two pieces of advice:
First, have the real project. It’s extremely easy to learn if you have a clear goal and specific problems to solve. Just reading a book without any practice won’t give you much. Come up with the idea for yourself and start bringing it to life. Then, pit it on GitHub and show everybody! :)
Second, go to as many job interviews as you can. It doesn’t matter if you already have a job or not. If you don’t, an interview is a great place where you can learn a lot, talk to smart and interesting people, and look for the job of your dream. The first few interviews can be scary, but with more experience, you’ll realize that they’ll become easier and easier for you. And if you do already have a job? An interview is a great opportunity to see what other people work on, what kind of person they’re looking for, and how they do their interviewing process. For me, an interview is also a way to feel more confident in my own skills and make sure I’m relevant in the current job market.
Thank you so much, Anastasia!
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!
