Django Girls Portland: A Retrospective

I had a moment of panic at Chipotle, wondering if all these boxes of taco fixings were going to fit in my Honda, especially since the box of t-shirts was still in the trunk. After swiping my card to pay for the installation party dinner, the chef started making trip after trip out of the kitchen with boxes and bags of Mexican food. This is never going to work, I thought. I needn’t have worried; my backseat is surprisingly spacious, and the whole way back to Treehouse my mouth watered from the smell of roasted chicken and sofritas. When I got to the event space and walked in the door, arms laden with bags of salsa and tortillas, the room was already filling up.  

They’re early! I hadn’t had time to put the butcher paper over the food tables, I realized that we totally forgot to get ice, and damn this was a lot of food to set up while I really wanted to be greeting our attendees and making them feel comfortable.

This is why coaches are awesome. Monique, Andrew, and Craig lept into action. They unloaded the rest of the boxes of rice, beans and steak from my car, set it all up, discovered the food labels Chipotle had provided (yay! no more wondering if I’d have time to label all the food for those with allergies), got the sterno lighters lit, and let me start greeting people.

The whole weekend of Django Girls Portland was like this; I’d start to panic that something wasn’t going right, or someone had a question I couldn’t answer, but other people swept in to fix it, handle it, answer it, and keep things going smoothly. In the end, Kenneth and I learned that planning a Django Girls workshop is a ton of work, but it is so worth it. We got so many hugs, thank you notes, tweets, Instagram photos, and expressions of joy and gratitude from the women who participated that weekend. One woman, who was a survivor of domestic violence and was attending the workshop to better manage the online presence of her nonprofits, said at the end of the day (and I’m paraphrasing here), “I’ve felt shut out of other workshops like this before, and I came in here expecting something similar. But I noticed every little thing you did to make us feel comfortable, to make this fun, to make this accessible to all of us.”

Our attendees said they felt empowered, capable, like they understood what they were doing, motivated, grateful, excited, and energized.

One attendee, a stylist and cancer survivor, told me that three years ago she was in the ICU and unable to walk on her own. Learning to code was something she always wanted to do so she’d be able to start a website to promote herself on a page that she controlled, not her employer. She said that Django Girls felt like her second chance.

Kenneth and I were ready to drop by the end of the day, but before we left, we were already comparing calendars to plan our second workshop. These are some of the things we want to keep in mind for Round Two:

Things That Were Awesome! 

T-Shirts

Some backstory: Django Girls ran a fundraising campaign to sell t-shirts that said, “This Is What A Programmer Looks Like.” Those shirts are awesome!

Kenneth and I talked to some men about those shirts, and while they loved the message, they didn’t want to buy one because wearing it would perpetuate the stereotype that all programmers are dudes! So we chatted with the other organizers in the Django Girls Slack channel about a possible slogan that would work for everyone, and someone suggested, “I Code Like A Girl.” We loved it.

Kenneth got to work and designed the logo for our shirts (which came out amazing, as you can see) and the response to them blew us away. We even had someone in Alabama request a onesie for his daughter over Twitter! So we are definitely doing these shirts for future workshops. They worked for our men coaches just as well as our women coaches and our attendees, and one attendee even commented, “I love that the guys are wearing this shirt, too!”

Noisemakers 

Our venue, Treehouse, has a tradition: When someone finishes filming a new course, everyone cheers for them when they come back to the office. Kenneth had the idea to recreate this during our installation party and workshop. We picked up a bag of noisemakers from a party store and told our attendees to make some noise when they did something cool! We heard rattles, bells, and whistles when they finished the installation, got the light blue “congratulations!” page, deployed, or just fixed a really tough bug. It made the atmosphere fun and celebratory; every time someone used their noisemaker, everyone else in the room stopped for a moment to cheer. It felt like a party all day! 

No pizza

Well, very little pizza. We served pizza for our coaches’ meetup, but we wanted the workshop events to feel more special than that. So we had a taco bar from Chipotle for dinner at the installation party, and a spread of kebobs, hummus, spinach pie, and pita from a local Mediterranean restaurant for lunch the day of the workshop. These meals also had the benefit of being very friendly to dietary restrictions.

But protip about Chipotle: If you cater from them, only order for about 75% of your headcount. They send you a ton of food, and Kenneth and I will be eating leftovers for the next week. 

Childcare

We offered free childcare, and we had 3 attendees take us up on it! We hired a friend of ours, a nursing student I know personally who passed a drug test and a background check to get into her program, to spend the day with an infant and two toddlers. They finger painted, sidewalk chalked, had snacks, napped, and generally hung out in the next room of our event space. Their moms were so grateful that we were able to offer it, and they also felt reassured that the childcare was on-site. Again, this is something that didn’t take up a lot of our budget, even making sure we paid our nanny market wages, but it made it possible for several of our attendees to make it to the workshop. It was totally worth doing.

Let’s do it better next time 

There were a few things about the workshop that we’ll do a little differently when we do this again.

First of all, this is a workshop for women, and many women menstruate! We should have had baskets of basic feminine products in the bathrooms. One attendee needed an extra pad, and we scrambled around trying to find her one. It wouldn’t cost much out of our budget, and it would have been a thoughtful thing to do.

Second, we would have looked for a venue with its own tables and chairs. Treehouse was amazing, and we are so grateful to them for letting us use their space, but they’re still pretty small. We rented tables and chairs for this event, which meant arriving at the venue really early to wait for them, lots of manual labor to set them up and break them down, and waiting at the venue the next day when we were really tired (thanks, Kenneth!) for them to be picked up. It also ate up a significant portion of our budget. Moving around in our venue became a pretty tight squeeze, which could have presented a real problem.

Luckily, we now have relationships with other sponsors who have more space, AND Treehouse is soon moving to bigger offices, so we should be able to avoid extra rentals next time!

And finally: we forgot ice! We all had room temperature water and soda all weekend. This is not the worst thing in the world, but when we do this again, it’s something I’ll remember.

What’s next? 

We had such a great time planning this event, and we learned a lot about how to make the next one even better. Next for Kenneth and I is to decide on a date for our second workshop and start planning!

In the meantime, we’re using MailChimp to keep track of people who’d like to be informed when the next workshop happens (and you can sign up here!). We’re also thinking about starting a semi-regular meetup to keep our attendees and coaches in touch with each other, and to give even more women a safe space to go through the tutorial at their own pace. There was a lot of interest from the women we talked to in having another space where they could keep learning and growing as coders. Portland has a super active PyLadies chapter, so we’re exploring ways to introduce our attendees to those women, as well. 

Finally, we couldn’t have done any of this without our sponsors! 

• Treehouse, an online education platform that provides low-cost programming tutorials, provided us with a venue and some amazing swag
• Quick Left, a company that builds web and mobile apps, hosted our coaches’ meetup 
• PDX Code Guild, a local developer bootcamp that teaches Python and Django, gave us financial support 
• Sweet Spot Diabetes, a local Python shop that helps healthcare providers get better data about their patients, gave us financial help 
• GitHub sent us stickers, gave our attendees a free year of the Micro plan, and helped us out financially
• The Python Software Foundation and Django Software Foundation also gave us financial help 
• Travel Portland gave us some awesome Portland buttons to give away 

Thanks also to all the coaches, volunteers, friends, and family members who supported Kenneth and I in putting on this event. And thanks in advance for supporting us through the next one! 

Hugs, cupcakes, and rainbows, 
Lacey and Kenneth 
@djangogirlspdx