My Django Girls Lagos Coaching Experience.

This blog post was written by Eyitemi Egbejule and was first published on his blog. Thanks!❤️

---

So sometimes in February, I had the immense privilege of being a coach at the Django Girls Workshop, A python boot-camp aimed at teaching girls how to code Python starting with building web applications leveraging on the Django web framework.

I got the opportunity to directly mentor 3 super amazing ladies.

This post would just be highlighting a few of my experiences. I’ll try to make it less boring, hope you have an exciting read.

This girls exhibited a yearning for learning that surpasses what I’ve seen or come across in a long while.

Based on what I’ve seen, and experienced here, I daresay, Ladies would make better programmers.

During my walkthrough of the Django girls tutorial, I encountered some bugs that took me a while to fix, and this momentary setback delayed my completion of the tutorial. Surprisingly, When Bolaji in my team encountered this same problem, she took a deep breath, laughed and muttered to herself, “I would fix this.” In a short while, she called my attention to her screen and explained to me how she had fixed this issue.

For me an experienced programmer, I came across an obstacle, had to take a break, gather my thoughts together and it took me a while to fix this, but Bolaji who was new to coding, saw a problem and armed with determination, figured out a way without “help”.

I was deeply challenged.

I’ll ask you guys a question.

When you encounter a bug, what do you do?

You impulsively try to fix it right?

This is something inherent in most programmers. They are always concerned with fixing bugs so their programs can continue to run.

Bugs are not just mistakes, they are a flaw in our thinking process. So figuring out why the bug was there in the first place is more important than fixing it.

Only 2 in 10 coders that would try to figure out why the bug was there in the first place.

Mercy was one of those 2 coders.

I remember my experience as a 17 year old learning C++ somewhat around 2009. When I couldn’t fix a bug in my code, or I encountered errors, I would get frustrated, abandon the project and stay for weeks without writing any piece of code for that period.

This apparent failure would go on to affect my confidence to solve problems, and dampen my disposition to everyday activities.

But then, I didn’t for one second see any of this in any of the ladies that were on my team. They showed this level of calmness even when they were not getting things right. I was awed. Not a single show of frustration.

There was this incidence, I instructed them to install version 1.8 of Django, using:

pip install django==1.8

but then Ijeoma had mistakenly typed:

pip install django

which installed the latest version of django, 1.9

This would go on to later affect our work requiring a restart.

I was looking for a nice way to put it across to her that she might have to go through the tutorial on her own considering that the time was already past 3:00 pm and the event would come to an end soon. She calmly took her laptop from me, and said she would do it again.

In an amazingly short time, she had started from scratch, uninstalled the un-needed version, installed the required one and was already at the same place as her teammates. She didn’t eventually finish the tutorial, but then, She impressed me with her speedy comeback.

Then there was Aisha’s superb coordination. I haven’t before been at a boot-camp or workshop where things were this excellently planned. Kudos to Her, Ibrahim and everyone who were involved.

There are quite a lot of other interesting things and I would love to share, maybe story for another day, but then I have to go check on how my girls are coming along.