Django Girls
Elements’ Yahia and Maria had the chance to be present as coaches at Django Girls Amsterdam on the 25th of June. The event was held at The Student Hotel at Wibautstraat in Amsterdam.
Django Girls is an organisation and community that was born in July 2014 in Berlin and started by two Polish girls: Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka. It was created “for the public benefit to close the gender gap in the IT and Computer Science sectors and advance the education of women and underrepresented groups of diverse ages, nationalities and ethnicities, located all over the world in such ways as the charity trustees think fit, including by:
- providing opportunities, such as free, accessible programming workshops for women and creating educational materials available online;
- promoting the image of female software engineer by driving advertising campaigns to encourage women to join the IT field and highlighting existing role models.”
(as stated in their charitable-purpose.md on Github)
Django Girls Amsterdam
The day started with a quick presentation from the organizers explaining what Django Girls is about and its success with reaching over 5,000 attendees worldwide.
The following presentations were from the sponsors of the event including GitHub and TransIp. The presenter from GitHub walked us through her path learning and getting into the tech industry. This was vermy much aligned with the general atmosphere of the event where being a developer should come first from interest and learning can be achieved in many different ways. Some of the tips she gave was to always stay part of the community and of course be a master Googler.
After that we moved to the room where each team had a separate table. Each team consisted of one coach and two or three women. Oh, and chocolate was provided too. In the session the participants were supposed to follow the Django Girls tutorial with their coach helping with any errors or additional explanation.
The tutorial was about creating a Blog from scratch using Django and deploying it at PythonAnywhere. This involved getting acquainted with Python (obviously) and creating a GitHub account and repository.
Midway through the day there was a team activity before the break by a corporate coach. The coach gave insight in how people perceive you and how you can improve certain aspects like your posture, voice and body language to give off confidence. Everyone was brought outside and had another exercise of giving off strong and confident energy while walking. It was a nice break from sitting around all day and the advice was very useful.
After a quick lunch we went back to finishing the tutorial. You could see then that people were getting a little frustrated and worried about finishing the tutorial in time. However, the coaches explained that the point of this event is not to finish the tutorial but to learn and be surrounded by people who have the same interest, so that you share your learning experience. After all that was the objective, to help break the barrier people face when trying to learn programming and it’s abstract concepts.
The overall feel of the event was of a relaxed get-together among friends and the general enthusiasm was quite contagious.
It was a really great way of testing one’s understanding of concepts and progress as a (pre-)Junior. Most of the participants had no prior knowledge in coding, so we were faced with some interesting and challenging questions.
Since we both joined Elements’ Junior Training program a few months back and (kind of) started with knowing very little about coding, we were able to understand the confusion they were facing with some of the concepts.
Lastly, it was a way of noticing the progress we made these past few months at Elements.
Looking forward to the next event :)
Originally published at www.elements.nl on July 12, 2016.
