Cupcakes, Code & Unicorns
On Saturday 22nd of June, the Elements office hosted the first Almere edition of Django Girls, a free programming workshop for women.
Django Girls is an amazing initiative with the aim to promote diversity in tech industry by empowering and inspiring women to learn programming. Thanks to providing free resources, tools and support, this community has enabled countless groups of dedicated volunteers to organize workshops around the world.
For some time now, there has been a growing interest in our team to contribute to a positive change in tech community by sharing our knowledge and dedicating our time. Organizing a Django Girls workshop was a perfect opportunity for this! We are so grateful that Elements fully supported this initiative and agreed to host and sponsor the event.
With an enthusiastic team of 16 volunteers and 23 motivated ladies we spent a day full of learning, interesting conversations and making new friends, while savouring delicious cupcakes made by talented Amy from ByEems.
We kicked off the workshop with a warm welcome, caffeine boost and an inspirational talk from our guest speaker Ana Maldonado, sharing her journey from chemistry to becoming the lead of the Data Science team at Altius.
Ana, thank you so much for being part of this workshop and proving to our Django Girls that with the right amount of dedication and focus it is possible to turn your career around.
Ana’s talk left us all with just the right amount of confidence boost and the work could start! Everyone grouped up with their preassigned team, found a spot in the office and started building their first blog in Django. A formidable task it may seem at first, but not with the help of our dedicated coaches and a tutorial created by Django Girls community.
The detailed tutorial that our workshop participants followed is designed for beginners and introduced them to the command line, Python, Django, HTML and CSS. Coaches stood ready to help out with any questions or hurdles and to explain things in a way that would make all this information easier to digest.
After a couple of hours of coding and a fulfilling lunch, we got the much welcome recharge of energy thanks to our amazing Eva and her creative approach to team exercise 🤸 😁
And then more work followed!
When it was time to wrap up the workshop and meet at Elements Cafe for some pizza and drinks, you might think you would see a weary bunch coming back downstairs with blank stares from hours of information overload. And surely tiredness has hit in by that point, but it was overcome with a new round of energy and motivation ignited by all the hard work and learning accomplished throughout the day.
We asked everyone how they were feeling and the responses were nothing short of AMAZING ❤
Ladies, you did it! You can now proudly call yourselves Django Girls!
We hope that this day inspired you to dive even deeper into the world of programming and that you will continue your learning journey knowing that you can accomplish anything and everything. Just never shy away from asking for help and sharing what you have learnt with others. Together it goes easier and is way more fun ❤
Thanks again to everyone who participated and until next year! 🧁👩💻🦄
