Django Girls made me confident about being a developer

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

My name is Paivi Suomela. I am thirty-two years old. I live in Sheffield in the United Kingdom. I had been learning to programme on my own before I attended the Django Girls workshop in London, but the event gave me a lot more motivation. I completed some open online university computer science courses and went through online tutorials to develop websites and mobile apps, and I also started building websites for myself.

About 6 months after the workshop I got my first job as a junior developer in a small business in Sheffield. Since working there I have learned a lot more programming, I work mostly on building Windows applications, but also on Django APIs and management systems and some Javascript apps. I’ve now been working as a developer for about 2 and a half years and I enjoy it a lot! I am also active in attending local programming groups in Sheffield. I attend local python, JavaScript and hardware hacker groups and I also work on my own projects. I’ve organised two Django Girls events here plus helped as a coach with a couple of others elsewhere in the UK.

Attending Django Girls workshop gave me the confidence to become a developer and also gave me the opportunity to meet lovely people that have encouraged me to become a more active member in the tech community and take part in projects.

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