Your Django Story: Meet Tracy Osborn

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

Tracy Osborn is the founder of WeddingLovely, a supportive hub for engaged couples and wedding vendors, focusing on making the wedding planning and vendor booking business more sane. In her spare time, she’s an avid backpacker and tries to spend as much time outside.

How did your story with code start?

Ha — funny story. I started playing with computers very early on because I had two family members that worked at Apple and IBM. When I was 11, I started making websites for fun (you know, table-based-websites and all that jazz) and was convinced I was a “programmer,” which lasted all throughout High School. So, naturally, I went into Computer Science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Literally day one, hour one, of CSC 101, I thought I made a mistake. The class was all about the parts of a computer and I remember everything going right over my head, when there were people in the class nodding along. I went to the professor after class and he convinced me to stick with it, but long story short, I made it through the year, trying futilely to learn Java, and finally gave up and changed majors to Art to focus on graphic design. I was determined never to program again and convinced I hated it.

Five years later, I was working as a freelance web designer and wanted to build a startup. I initially tried to find a cofounder (a long story for another time), and finally came to the realization that I needed to build what I needed, not find someone to do it for me. Which meant programming. Thankfully, this time around I tried Python and had a much better time!

 

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

My one and only “real” job was working as a web designer at a small startup — literally in a garage in San Luis Obispo. I stayed with them for 4.5 years before jumping into freelance web design for about a year, before jumping into the startup world (and programming world) with WeddingLovely.

 

What do you love the most about coding?

As someone who does design as well, the I love the fact that coding success feels way easier. It doesn’t work until it does! (Of course you can always improve the code, but besides that.) Design is so qualitative, and never really a 100% “perfect” design, always something more you can do. With coding, I can think of a problem and work on it until it works, and then move onto another problem — whereas with design, I always wonder if I could have done better because there is no 100% sure way to say it “works.”

 

Why Django?

I love Python for its simplicity and cleanness, and Django is awesome for the sheer amount of awesome things built in to make web app development super fast. Django 1.7 now comes with migrations built in, which is just awesome and will make new development and new projects a lot simpler. Django is simply the best for a new developer creating their first Python web app.

 

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

Other than my startup WeddingLovely (which I’m proud to say I’ve build everything myself!), I’ve been writing a book to teach web app development using Django, called Hello Web App. I’m self-publishing and funded the book through Kickstarter (woohoo!) though it’s taking a lot longer to write the book than I anticipated. It’s really exciting though — the book focuses on teaching web app development with Django for non-programmers and especially visual learners, and I’m hoping it’ll help a lot of people learn how to build web apps that have felt intimidated by programming before.

 

What are you the most proud of?

Broken record — my startup! I’m not a runaway success by startup standards, but I make enough to support myself and I get to promote small/local businesses and promote sane wedding planning to boot. And all the code is 100% written by yours truly — every year I work on WeddingLovely I get better and build more awesome and complex features. Building WeddingLovely has helped me become a better programmer, as well as allowing me to work from home, run my own business, and travel.

 

What are you curious about?

Teaching — which is the main reason why I’m writing Hello Web App! I’d love to learn how to teach and help people launch web apps, though I’ve only given one tutorial so far (at PyCon 2014) and definitely need more practice.  I consider public speaking and conferences talks teaching too, and would love to do that more and get into that world.

 

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

Travelling! I’m lucky that I can work anywhere. My husband (another Python programmer) and I worked for three months in Europe last fall — rented apartments for a few weeks at a time and alternated tourist and work days. I love traveling and try to do it as much as possible. When I’m home, if I have spare time (and lately I haven’t), I work in my garden. Right now it’s a mess though because I haven’t had the time.

 

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

If something isn’t working for you (a particular tutorial or technique), see if something else exists that’s better for you. Particularly with tutorials, there is such a range of quality, and just because you’re not “getting it” from one source doesn’t mean you won’t have that lightbulb moment with another. I started with the default Django tutorial, which didn’t work at all for me, but after some searching and recommendations from friends, I found a few that were more my style and I was able to figure things out. I also started working on a real project, not following the tutorials verbatim, which made learning more fun and more interesting for me and really helped make things “stick.” Plus that random project turned into my startup, which was pretty awesome too!

Thanks Tracy! :)

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