Your Django Story: Meet Irene Nandutu
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Irene Nandutu is a passionate tech enthusiast with a keen interest in startups, entrepreneurship and innovation. She likes to learn new skills and advance ideas that can add value and change her local community technologically.
As a teaching assistant, community volunteer, organizer of Django Girls Mbale, and mentor to many, Irene organizes and attends tech-related events in order to learn and increase her personal knowledge base in the tech field, so that she can share that knowledge with her community. While pursuing a MSC in Mobile Computing, Irene also works with a startup software company called Hansu Mobile Innovations.
How did your story with code start?
I was not exposed to computers until unversity, where I pursued undergraduate courses in computing. It was there that I attended my first programming classes. At first, I did not find it all that interesting, as the culture of errors was one I was not pleased to work with. I asked myself, “Why programming? Who uses my programs? How do they use them?” and similar questions.
When I considered the answers, I realized computing was where I belong because of the strong desire I have to solve problems. Even after a tiresome journey, I get great satisfaction to know that a project I worked on is something users love.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was your average university student thinking on how best I could make money to support myself.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love the fact that coding makes me work independently, exposes me to challenges and gives me a chance to keenly think about how to achieve the set objective.
Coding has enabled me to meet new people through the different technology communities.
Finally, it has given me the opportunity to empower other women and introduce girls to programming.
Why Django?
It has good Admin capabilities which are automatically generated. Its security is such that no one needs to worry about implementation. Django has all these tools and many more implemented for us.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
I am working on a research project in speech to speech translation.
What are you most proud of?
My pride is to see the women I have mentored create products that can be used with in our community and also be able to empower other women.
What are you curious about?
My curiosity changes with time and now my curiosity is centered on speech language processing, and how I can put together the different models to easily implement a recognition process I have in mind, while still considering the interactivity of the larger project.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I don’t always have a lot of free time to let the explorer in myself wander. But, I dearly love traveling, hiking and anything adventurous, I also like seeking new knowledge and understanding how I can productively use it.
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
A beginner should know that believing in yourself is a game changer. It will enable you to persist however how many errors you encounter. Please know that errors are just part of learning and becoming an expert in your area of specialization.
How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?
As an Organizer and a Coach at different Django Girls workshops, I have learned to be patient, dedicated and commited to the opportunity of giving back my community.
I have also learned and loved mentorship/teaching of late which enables me to empower more women to technology.
You can watch a brief video of Django Girls events in Uganda here.
Thank you so much, Irene!
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!
