Your Django Story: Meet Kelsey Gilmore-Innis
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Kelsey Gilmore-Innis is the CTO of Sexual Health Innovations, and a transplanted San Franciscan living in Portland.
How did your story with code start?
Somehow, despite growing up in San Francisco during the thick of the first tech boom and bust, I never was exposed to code until adulthood. I took a programming for non-majors course a few years into college on a bit of a whim and, besides enjoying the subject matter, saw a path to a career. It took a little more time, but I ended up graduating with a CS degree.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I was studying the history and theory of sex education before I transferred to computer science, which may explain my fascination at the time with a field that provides lucrative jobs! I definitely didn’t expect to draw on that early passion in my programming career, but I now lead the technology team at Sexual Health Innovations, a non-profit that builds tech that advances sexual health and wellbeing.
What do you love the most about coding?
I love making tangible things that other people can use. For a while I was pretty into the more theoretical side of programming–Scala and the functional paradigm–but building actual products, with all the tradeoffs and compromises that entails, has really re-sparked my love of programming.
Why Django?
As the first tech employee at SHI, I was able to choose the programming language and web framework we use wholesale. I was looking for a choice that was popular enough that I would be able to easily hire developers to work with me, thoughtful about security, and had an inclusive and kind community. Django checked all those boxes for us–especially the third!
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Our main initiative at SHI is Callisto, survivor-centered online reporting for sexual assault. It’s all in Django and we’re releasing the core code soon so other developers can build on our technology. At home, I am working on a Python Twitter bot that tweets all the blocks of the AIDS Quilt.
What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of building Callisto, which has already helped sexual assault survivors and will help many more, with minimal resources and under a very tight deadline.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
Lately I’ve been learning to sew and birdwatch. I am a big nerd about the history of First Ladies and someday want to start a podcast about them!
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
I think a thing we don’t say enough to new programmers, because we get lost in enthusiasm and encouragement, is that a lot of programming is hard and/or boring. Just slogging through those parts to get to your goal (whether that’s to get a job, build a product, or whatever) is totally valid and allowed. If you don’t love every single minute of getting code running, it doesn’t make you a bad programmer or ill-suited for programming.
Thank you so much, Kelsey!
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!
