Your Django Story: Meet Martha Rotter
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Martha Rotter is a software developer and co-founder of Woopie, a digital publishing platform for people who want their stuff read on any device. She is a book & magazine junkie fascinated with the future of reading, digital documents, and interactive content. Originally from St. Louis, she now splits her time between Dublin, Ireland and San Francisco. You can follow her @martharotter.
How did your story with code start?
My oldest brother bought a Commodore 64 when I was about six. He and his friends would trade games around, and I was crazy about computer games. When he upgraded to a Commodore 128 a couple of years later, it came with BASIC 7.0 and a manual for how to use BASIC to make the computer do things. I would type the code from the manual into the C128 and watch it do stuff – it was amazing! I spent a lot of those years playing with BASIC and then playing on BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) when we got a modem. My high school had a Macintosh LC lab where we could do HyperCard programming, and I ended up joining the school newspaper and becoming the Editor-in-Chief so that I could have unlimited access to the computer lab. Throughout my life I’ve remained addicted to computers, but I probably owe a lot of that to my older brothers and the time they spent playing computer games with me.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
My first major in college was international business, because everyone had always told me I should study business, but I wanted to travel & learn about other places, too. It sounds ridiculous now, but I didn’t know you could get a job working as a programmer – I didn’t even know anyone who used computers for their jobs at the time I was entering college. During my first semester, I took a programming course in C as an elective and started reading about computer science as a career.
A few weeks later, I called my parents to tell them I was going to switch majors and they freaked. They told me I could study programming but I could not drop out of business school (they didn’t know anyone who was a programmer either!). So I did both & graduated with degrees in computer science, international studies and business administration. It took me five years, but it was definitely worth it.
What do you love the most about coding?
Probably solving problems. There is nothing like that feeling you get when you figure out how to do something complex and making it happen. I also love that there is always something new and interesting to learn – I find it’s impossible for me to get bored as a programmer because there are always exciting new concepts, tips and tricks, APIs and languages to learn.
Why Django?
I have been programming in Python for a long time, and one of my first consulting projects back in 2010 ended up being done in Django. I fell in love with how quickly I could get things done, how flexible and how powerful it was. I think the community that has built up around Django is excellent and so there are now not only a lot of great libraries out there but also wonderful people to learn from.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
Right now most of my time is focused on my company Woopie (http://woop.ie), which is a digital publishing tool to help businesses and publishers create documents and publications that work everywhere. I am very passionate about reading experiences and new devices, and I don’t think anyone has solved this yet as it’s a big problem, so it’s very exciting to me.
What are you the most proud of?
Besides developing Woopie, I am also proud of Idea magazine (http://readidea.com). In 2011, I was disappointed with the lack of coverage for startups and interesting tech happening in Ireland. There were a lot of cool companies and great people, but no one ever talked about them. I came up with Idea magazine as a bi-monthly magazine to cover all of these topics, to do things like featuring forward-thinking design studios, cover how-to’s, get opinion and investigative pieces, etc. We shut down the magazine after 6 issues because the platform we had created to generate the magazine (which was Woopie), was taking off more than our magazine subscriptions! I loved working on it, though, and it gave me a lot of insight into digital publishing and the magazine world.
What are you curious about?
Generally everything! But some areas that I have really gotten interested in over the last few years are data journalism and quantified self. I have done some hacks/hackers workshops and really love the overlap of tech and journalism - it’s so powerful what we can learn and how data journalists are able to educate people this way. The news organizations that are reporting using solid data are making a huge difference. With quantified self, I find it really empowering that people can own their understanding of their health and learn more about how what they do will affect them on a daily as well as long-term basis. Wearables like fitbit and Nike Fuelband have moved quantified self interests into the mainstream, so this area will only get more exciting.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
In my limited spare time, if I’m not working on Woopie or side projects, I love cooking and running. I also enjoy travelling a lot and learning languages. And I love any kind of dancing, from tap to ballet to breakdancing!
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Find a community. I love working in startups and on small teams, but one of the best things I found about working in a big company is that there is always someone to ask, someone who has been there, done that. So if you start out in a small team or working for yourself, it’s seriously important to find a community of people, online or offline or both, where it’s okay to ask questions and there are people who you can learn from. Barcamps (like the wonderful Django Bar Camp in San Francisco last weekend!) and Hackathons are often great ways to do this too.
Thanks Martha! :)
