Your Django Story: Meet Ola Sitarska

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

Ola is one of the founders of Django Girls and also the co-founder of Issue Stand. She is 22 years old and lives in Warsaw, Poland. 

How did your story with code start?

As a 13-year old girl I was spending a lot of my free time in front of the computer, playing some games online. I really liked one particular game that I was playing for a year in which I was also a chat moderator. All moderators really wanted to have more tools to manage the chat and banned users… so as a 14-year old girl I thought: how hard can it be? And I started googling. It was a really long journey, but a year later I created my first website in PHP. I fell in love with the feeling of working on something that was really difficult for a long time and it finally WORKED. Really empowering.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was just a kid that liked to make things.

What do you love the most about coding?

I love the fact that I can be independent. I can think of some idea and I can build it. This is the most empowering thing ever.

It also gave me an opportunity to meet fantastic people in our community and make some great friends.

Programming skills allowed me to support my family at a very young age, leave my small town, study and live in the capital of Poland, which I couldn’t otherwise do.

Programming changed my whole life.

Why Django?

This is actually a funny story: before I met Django I was a PHP developer. I spent a half of my time writing management tools for the websites I created, so other people could modify the content without knowing how to program. I suddenly learned that Django is this thing that does it automatically (twice more time to build websites!) and in addition you don’t have to worry too much about security (again more time to build awesome websites!). So you could say that I actually changed the language I was programming in because of auto generated admin :)

I fell in love with Django from the very first day and never looked back.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I am currently in the process of changing my daily job, so I can’t talk about my work projects yet :)

Most of my time is now dedicated to making Django Girls bigger and better. I work on our tutorial, help local organisers kick off their events, build resources and tools that will help us scale in the future. I’m really passionate about bringing more fantastic women into the field!

What are you the most proud of?

I am most proud of the way we organised DjangoCon Europe 2013. We took some really big risks, worked many hours and poured all of our hearts into making this an amazing experience for everyone. It really paid off: http://love.djangocircus.com/. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to do this.

What are you curious about?

After starting Django Girls I quickly became quite obsessed with removing the roadblocks that are so neatly laid out for people who are just starting with programming. I am curious how we, as a community, can be more emphatic and make it more easier for people to start programming and contribute to open source projects like Django.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

Besides organising conferences and events, which I loooove to do, I also love spending time with people close to me while traveling to quiet places, playing games, learning an ukulele and reading books.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

If you like doing this, then stick to it. Programming can sometimes be frustrating or boring, but it will get better. Don’t ever let someone tell you that you shouldn’t be programming. Ask for help often and help others

Thanks Ola! :)

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