Django Girls is landing at Seoul, Korea
Interview Organizers :
Rachell, Sujin, Jin, Hassan
1. Django Girls Seoul History
Who are main organizers of Django Girls Seoul? How do they meet together?
Answer (Hassan) :
We are a small group of enthusiastic learners who started meeting together since July 2014. One of our group member Sujin Lee initiated Python study group and later more people joined us. Initially, there was a lot of interest from Women because Python is considered as relatively easy language for newbies. Since then, we have been meeting regularly every week (sometimes bi-weekly) and study together. We are very welcoming to absolute beginners and don’t hesitate to help anyone joining anytime. In the beginning, we followed curriculum from MOOC courses such as Interactive Programming with Python (Rice University), Programming for everybody (Michigan University), and later challenged our group to take a top notch MIT course (on edX). We also had special sessions for raspberry pi, pygames, data visualization with Python etc. Although we are thinking about a new name of our group. Our existing site is located here : http://mooccircle.github.io/
Answer (Rachell) :
Some of our members are programmers and others are just starting out learning but the thing both of these groups share is the desire to create a community that believes in free and open sharing of knowledge. We believe in the idea of learning through teaching, it’s not just free programming workshops or meet-ups. After you learn you are expected to slowly step up to the plate and take on more reasonability as a member by teaching new members. This way, anything you learned before you must master in order to teach.
Our group started with Python and then moved onto Django more recently. Django Girls came up in conversation. This sparked the idea and we decided to apply and give it a shot. We have always welcomed anyone regardless of language or other factors so we wanted to reach out and include more people so that’s where the idea for Django Girls came out.
The founders of Django Girls and everyone in the community has made it really easy to plan an event because all of the material is all online with examples of what others have done. They have the tutorial online, an organizer’s manual, a coach’s manual and they even making running the Django Girls Seoul website really easy. It’s because of their friendly, open source attitude that Django Girls has really taken off and also why we’re excited to be part of it.
It is very interesting this is the event for foreigners and Korean. Have you ever tried this kind of event before? Or have you ever attended workshop for foreign programmers here?
Answer (Rachell):
We haven’t hosted a big workshop like this, and frankly we didn’t expect this one to become so popular. Everyone is welcome in our group; it’s not just for Koreans or just for foreigners. We think everyone can benefit from a very diverse group because we all bring a different perspective and different experiences to the table. We organized smaller study groups with both Koreans and foreigners where the members met over a period of time and studied Massive Open Online Courses(MOOC) together. There were other groups of people that studied Android development course. (hassan)
What do you expect main attendees for this event? Are there lots of programmers who want to learn Django and foreign or Korean programmers here?
Answer (Rachell):
We expect a large turnout of very motivated participants. We’ve already passed our expectation of the number of applicants.
It was surprising how many programmers seem interested in attending. This event’s targeted participant is a total beginner but we’ve seen a lot of applicants that have quite a lot of experience in other languages.
What is main difficulties to prepare this event? What kind of helps do you need more? For examples, do you want more attendees, coaches or sponsors?
Answer (Rachell):
One main difficulty is communication and making sure everything is in English and Korean so all participants and coaches feel comfortable communicating with each other and organizers.
Because of all the interest we decided to increase the size of the event so we need awesome volunteer coaches and sponsors to help make it a successful event.
2. Django & Workshop introduction
There are lots of frameworks and programming languages. Why do you pick specially Django?
Answer (Jin Park):
Django makes it easy for python programmers to get into web development. It provides everything for a modern web application. It is also very easy to get learn for any programmer and the concepts from Django extend to any other web framework.
What is main strength of Django? (Jin Park)
Answer (Jin Park)
Most users of Django are huge fans of the admin interface. It allows non technical users to create, change and delete data without learning how Django works.
Why does its workshop focus on WOMEN?
Answer (Sujin):
Simply, because I am woman! Women like men, love learning new technology, making something with creative idea and making a splash. In coming workshop, we hope women can feel it with us.
What do you think of Women programmers culture in South Korea? Is it good environment for women programmers than other countries?
Answer (Sujin):
In Korea, there is a rising interest on promoting IT startup environment for women. Communities for professional women engineers and developers are active and it is easy to find to join small talk events for women entrepreneurs. However, there are little chances for women with zero processing experience to grow up skills together.
Why does its workshop focus on BEGINNERS?
Answer (Rachell):
The main goal is to increase diversity in the IT community and that means to get new and different people. Because there aren’t many women already in the field we have to start from the basics. After they see they are capable of making a website and doing basic programming they will be inspired and motivated to continue.
If we make an advanced workshop a lot of women won’t feel comfortable coming even if they have the same experience as men that would participate. In this field and with many, there is ‘impostor syndrome’ that makes women of equal experience feel they don’t belong or their skills aren’t good enough.
Please give some advice for beginner programmers. For examples, how do they improve their programming skill, and how can they keep studying, not giving up?
Answer (Sujin):
Learning a programming language is like learning to ride a bicycle. Banish those self-doubts and fears. Somehow you will be frequently frustrated frustrated in errors on script, but don’t worry. Just fix everyday a little bit. If you are hesitant about choosing programming language or references, make programmers friends and ask them, ‘How did you learn?’. Are you non-english speaker? I strongly recommend to start programming with ENGLISH. It would be hard, however, in nearest future, your code will be more elegant with up-to-date style as seeing other’s code. Somehow you can collaborate a project with fabulous people in the world!
What do you think of developer community’s culture in South Korea? Is Korean more or less active about developer community than other countries?
Answer (Hassan):
South Korea is very competitive country for developers. As technology is rapidly changing, therefore there is thirst and hunger to learn it before anyone else. There are couple of limitation for developers in Korea. For example all new tech , apis, sdk docs are published in English therefore it is difficult for an average Korean developer to understand and adopt it right away. They wait for other Korean developers who are proficient in English to either translate it or teach them. So most of the developer communities I know in Korea, works on same principle. There are some geeks who translate stuff to Korean and teach/guide other developers. In my humble opinion, there is a drawback in it too. For example Google announced new tech and APIs during Google I/O couple of months ago, but some folks in South Korea were waiting for all information to be translated to Korean before they jump into it. In doing so, they are already couple of months behind other developers in accessing that knowledge. Consequently, this will lead to delayed adoption of new tech.
There are some active developer communities in Korea such as Google Developers Group (GDG), Code for Seoul and some others listed on meetup.com. All of them are doing amazing stuff by putting some effort to bring developers together for sharing knowledge.
Korea has better infrastructure (fast internet, better facilities — every coffee shop or meeting place has wi-fi) than many of the countries around the world.
In summary, Korean developer communities are very active but often they are not very welcoming to absolute beginners. Moreover, there is a English barrier for self-learning which is main motivation for joining developer communities rather than learning new tech stuff.
3. Django Girls Seoul Plan
What is main purpose of Django Girls Seoul?
Answer (Rachell) :
I’d say the main purpose echoes that of Django Girls: to bring more amazing women into the world of technology and increase the diversity in a community where women are very underrepresented.
What is future plan of Django Girls Seoul? Are you going to hold more workshops?
Answer:(Rachell)
We haven’t finished the first event so we don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves, but so far this is going a lot better than expected. In both the Korean and foreigner community there is a huge interest in this kind of event so there is already talk of making another. It’s really exciting how this has taken off and although there isn’t anything scheduled yet I’m sure there will be more similar workshops in the future.
We haven’t finished the first event so we don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves, but so far this is going a lot better than expected. In both the Korean and foreigner community there is a huge interest in this kind of event so there is already talk of making another. It’s really exciting how this has taken off and although there isn’t anything scheduled yet I’m sure there will be more similar workshops in the future
Besides the workshop we have regular study sessions that we hope to get more people involved in. Although they aren’t as fancy as a big workshop they’re very useful in keeping up with your tech skills and it’s really motivating and fun to hang out with like minded people.
