Django Girls Blog

This post is part of our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django.

Hi! My name is Juliana. I was born and raised in the vibrant city of Cartagena (Colombia) and am now living in Stockholm, where I’m wrapping up a masters in Strategic Information Systems Management at Stockholm University, building on my background in business management. 

I’m currently writing my thesis at Scania, as part of their research and development department. My work aims to propose a requirements engineering framework for electric vehicle system development;  requirements are the conditions or functionalities a system must meet to fulfill its purpose. My study has an IT-Business alignment focus, and the goal is to simplify how system requirements are gathered and managed during development, ensuring they are traceable and verifiable.

Can you share your experience with Django Girls and how it has influenced your path to where you are today?

In 2019, I joined a Django Girls workshop about Python in Cartagena. I was studying business management at the time, and I was curious about coding, but I was not thinking about getting into tech, it was a 'mini-adventure'. Honestly, it was very overwhelming at first, but later I was amazed when I saw the projects built by members, and many of the possibilities, and I got the sense that it was something I wanted and needed to learn. 

I put the tech scene on hold for a while, but eventually came back with a clear purpose: blending my business background with IT.  Django Girls was the spark: the workshop was an introduction to a community that supported my masters journey, and continues to influence me as I build my profile as a business analyst. 

The Django Girls workshop helped me see myself differently. Not just as someone curious about tech, but as someone who belongs in it. Today, I’m building a career that bridges business and technology, and I’m just getting started!

What was it like to switch or re-focus your career towards tech? What drove that change for you?

Three things motivated me: curiosity, impact and representation. I wanted to work on meaningful projects, and I believe tech brings possibilities and scalability to this. Moreover, seeing more women getting into tech through workshops and communities, gave me more reasons to believe I could too. I’ve also felt the common “imposter syndrome”, but we’re thriving here no matter what!

Yes, it was challenging to pivot from business to IT—or well, blend them—but it was very much worth it.

What are your thoughts on the relationship between diversity and the tech world? How do you see the two influencing each other?

Representation matters, always! When I see another latina in tech, I see myself in tech. I also believe diversity brings different perspectives, and we NEED this. We need knowledge and solutions from different backgrounds, which is the only way to tackle today’s and coming complex challenges. DEI shouldn't be a trend, it should be a foundation.

What are your tech interests?

I see tech as a means, as a solution, as an endless journey. For me tech = opportunity (when used responsibly, I must state). 

I’m especially interested in how tech can simplify and improve processes: within organizations, between organizations and customers, and across communities. 'How can this be improved?' is always on my mind, and 'what systems can we implement?'. For example, the retail industry has a huge waste problem globally. Incorporating the use of ML models for accurate product demand forecasting can help reduce overproduction, excess inventory and waste. This is an industry and projects I’d like to work on in the future. 

Tech is more than information systems, it’s systems with intention.

What do you enjoy outside of tech? How do these connect with your overall journey?

Outside of tech, I am a bookworm and community builder. I’ve founded two book clubs: Club Entrelíneas in Cartagena (2017), and Bookish Stockholm (2023). Entrelíneas is still active thanks to my friend Keren Rivas, who stepped in as director in 2022.

Our sessions often lead to deep conversations, including our complex relationship with tech. Some faves for this: Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang, Solaris by Stanisław Lem and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury—a classic that started both book clubs. This community keeps me grounded, curious and connected. I also enjoy cooking and dancing, and I recently started practicing yoga to maintain my wellbeing.

After 10 years of Django Girls, looking back and seeing how much we have achieved is amazing 🎉. Throughout this time, we have constantly looked to improve ourselves, and through this, one of our main areas of focus over the last few years has been improving our diversity and inclusion. This has come in many forms, including:

working with experts in conducting an anti-racist audit ✊🏾

creating an advisory board to bring in more voices from under-represented communities, including disability and accessibility 👩🏽‍🦽

consulting with LGBTQ+ communities 🌈

We consider this an ongoing process, and there is more for us to do, but this year we have decided to make one significant change to the Django Girls brand.

From now on, we will be:

This might seem like a small change on the surface, but there has been a lot of work in the background that has gone into this decision. For a long time, we have wondered if the name Django Girls truly represents our audience. While we have always advocated for the inclusion of trans and non-binary participants in our workshops and have never excluded men from attending, we wanted to find a way to make it more obvious that we are LGBTQ+ friendly. 

Django Girls has turned 10!  We’re so proud to reach this momentous milestone, and of everything the community has achieved!

During the past decade, 2467 volunteers in 109 countries have run 1137 free workshops.  More than 24500 women in 593 cities have attended our events and, for many of them, Django Girls was their first step towards a career in tech.

See them on a map.

How it started

Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka founded Django Girls.  It all began with a single workshop in Berlin in 2014, and a tutorial written by Ola and Ola.  It was (and still is) aimed at complete beginners who have never written any code in their life.  45 women attended the first event, to learn how to build the Internet using HTML, CSS, Python and Django.  Between them, they deployed 40 brand-new apps and opened 30 pull requests against the tutorial.

Within a year, more than 70 Django Girls workshops had been held in 34 countries on six continents.  To support the huge growth, Ola and Ola then obtained charitable status for the Django Girls Foundation, and ran the organisation for another four years.

Listen to Ola and Ola go down memory lane on the Django Girls podcast.

How it’s going

Today, Django Girls is still thriving, and we currently have 20 workshops, and counting, in the pipeline.  There is always room for more!  Visit our website to find out how to organise a workshop, or coach at one.  84.9% of respondents to our 10th birthday survey said organising or coaching at our workshops deepened their understanding of Django.

We also caught up with some of our past attendees.  After coming to one of our events, 71.2% continued learning to code and 44.7% started working in tech.  Here are some of their Django Girls stories…

“I was a stay at home mom.  I was learning how to code and had a great experience at the Django Girls workshop.  After completing training with an intensive bootcamp, I came back to the workshop as a coach.  I am now a data engineer at Xbox.”

- a workshop attendee in 2016 who was also a workshop coach in 2017

“After Django Girls, I improved my grades and graduated.  Then I got a job.  After completing the senior software engineering position, I was promoted to team leader.  That's how Django Girls motivated me so much.”

- a 2016 workshop organiser

“I started working in tech after attending a Django Girls workshop.  I am a software engineer in the space industry.  When I discovered Django Girls, I was close to the end of my studies in Geomatics engineering and was expecting to start working as a Surveying Engineer or pursue further studies in that field of engineering. The openness and supportive atmosphere of the first Django Girls workshop I attended made me consider tech as an alternative, as I was getting more and more interested in programming. I transitioned to tech after that event and I have been working in this field since then.”

- a 2017 workshop attendee

“I started learning web development and that launched my tech journey.” - workshop attendee in 2016, workshop coach in 2018 “I previously worked in the hospitality industry, as a bartender.  I am now a software engineer!”

- a 2017 workshop attendee

How you can get involved

Attend or coach at a workshop - see the list of forthcoming workshops

Apply to organise a workshop in your city

Buy your exclusive “1010 Years Of Django Girls” t-shirt

As we begin our fundraising campaign for 2024, we are excited to announce another great company joining us as a global partner - DigitalOcean!

DigitalOcean simplifies cloud computing so businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world. With its mission-critical infrastructure and fully managed offerings, DigitalOcean helps developers at startups and growing digital businesses rapidly build, deploy and scale, whether creating a digital presence or building digital products.

DigitalOcean combines the power of simplicity, security, community and customer support so customers can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time building innovative applications that drive business growth.

DigitalOcean is pleased to support the Django Girls' mission to empower women and girls with technology. They are joining us at the Diamond sponsor level.

For more information, visit digitalocean.com.

Happy New Year!

We are excited to start the year by announcing a great company joining us as a global partner - OddBird!

OddBird collaborates with teams at mid-size and large companies to plan, design, and develop custom web applications and design systems. As thoughtful experts, they love to help their clients improve team workflow, lower maintenance costs, and solve problems with technology that help people. They provide the full range of services from brand design, user research, and project management, to Python on the backend, CSS/Sass on the frontend, and JavaScript.

OddBird was founded in 2008 by three siblings with a vision for human-centered software design and development on the web, especially focused on accessibility, performance, integrated design systems, and long-term sustainability. Since then, OddBird has become an industry leader – from our work on Django, Sass, and Susy, to the W3C, Mozilla Developer Channel, Object-Oriented UX, and in-depth conference talks on front-end architecture, workflow, component libraries, testing, and documentation. 

Their clients get to know their tight-knit team on a first-name basis. OddBird is intentionally small, enabling them to move nimbly and integrate with teams at larger companies like Adobe, Google, Mozilla, and SRAM for a big impact. They all learn what makes each project special, and strategize together – keeping the backend, frontend, and design integrated for a shared understanding of each company's goals and user needs.

OddBird staff frequently give conference talks and workshops, write articles and speak on podcasts to teach people how to create more resilient web applications and design systems – improving team processes, communication, site performance, and accessibility.

OddBird has supported us in the past for years through Patreon and we are excited to have them back as our Silver sponsor. 

Thank you OddBird!

We are excited to announce another excellent company joining us as Django Girls' global partner, RunCode!

Software development is made easy with the emerging Cloud Development Environment systems. RunCode.io is always trying to make developer lives easy by providing pre-built ready-to-code workspaces. Now anyone can start coding with the click of a button.

They mainly focus on: 

Live collaboration

Isolated development environment

Security first

Code from any device

Pre-built environment ready to code with the click of a button

Connect with your favourite git hosting (GitHub GitLab, BitBucket).

Developers around the world spend hours setting up their development environments, laptops, and machines, resulting in expensive upgrades, and all the efforts may be for nothing if a single hardware error occurs. The solution to this problem is the - ”Cloud”! Imagine how wonderful it would be if we have the same development tools in the cloud, with almost zero installation/setting-up efforts at a very attractive and economical price.

RunCode has taken up this challenge, and brings the “RunCode cloud development environment”. RunCode is a cloud-based, robust, secure, ready-to-code developer workspace, that provides a high-performance & fully configurable coding environment to developers. Their browser-based platform enables seamless collaboration between teams across operating systems and devices on a real-time basis, at the click of a button. 

RunCode Workspaces support over 40+ Linux-based programming languages, 11+ databases, and 22+ frameworks thereby opening up a world of opportunities for the code-indulgent folks. RunCode Workspaces are powered by 8 core CPU, 16 GB RAM, 30 GB cloud storage, and VS Code IDE or Jupyter lab for data science and more to come.

Spinning up a workspace is straightforward, the user simply has to open https://runcode.io/ and click on the pre-configured templates, or by adding one line anchor tag to the readme.md file, users can open their repositories on RunCode Workspaces. Real-time collaboration and access from any device are the added advantages of the platform.

They are investing heavily in the open-source ecosystem by offering unlimited access to eligible developers under our open-source contributor program. Likewise, they have students, educational institutions, startups, and incubators programs.

Thank you RunCode!

We are excited to announce another great company joining us as a global partner in 2022 - PostHog!

PostHog offers a suite of product analysis tools, including funnels, heat maps, session recording, and experimentation, all in one easy-to-use platform. They are open-source, so you can host it on your own infrastructure. This means you have greater control over who has access to your data, and makes regulatory compliance a breeze because you don't need to send user info to third parties.

PostHog's plugin system works seamlessly with tools such as data warehouses, both for importing and exporting data. This allows you to bring data across your tools into one place and easily understand user behaviour across a range of touchpoints.

PostHog joined our Patreon campaign in March 2022.

Thank you PostHog! We are happy to have you support our work.

We are once again excited to announce another great company joining us as our global partner - Flatirons Development!

Flatirons Development is a software development and full-service design firm that specializes in moving early-stage software companies from point A to point B. They are focused on building SaaS products, multi-user applications, marketplaces, and complex systems that balance user needs with critical business goals.

In 2020, Flatirons Development launched their investment arm, Flatirons Fund, to encourage innovation during a troubled economic climate and the years beyond. They are dedicated to supporting and advancing a new wave of software developers and founders, particularly women and people of color who have traditionally been underrepresented in the space. By investing product development and design talent in early-stage companies, their goal is to get founders to a place where they can go out and successfully raise funds or hit their next big milestone.

Flatirons Development is about to release their first consumer-facing product built for developers, Flatirons Fuse. Flatirons Fuse fixes the headache of data onboarding with an embeddable CSV import tool. With just a few lines of code, developers can provide their customers with a powerful data onboarding experience, including AI-powered column matching, frontend data validation and cleaning, and backend data validation support.

They joined our Patreon campaign this month. We are so excited to have them on board, supporting our work.

Thank you Flatirons Development!

As the year ends, we are excited to be introducing another great company joining us as a global partner for Django Girls - Six Feet Up!

Six Feet Up, Inc. is a Python and cloud expert consulting company that helps innovative tech leaders build apps faster, innovate with AI/ML, simplify Big Data, and leverage Cloud technology.

Using modern technologies and processes, their mission is to Make Anything Possible™ for their clients. They are committed to completing 10 IMPACTFUL Projects by 2025. IMPACTFUL Projects are defined as projects that are impressive, purposeful, and transformative. To date, Six Feet Up has had the privilege to work on 4 IMPACTFUL Projects — ranging from space exploration to lightning strike predictions, forest fire management, and genetic engineering. The company is well on its way to achieving this goal.

At Six Feet Up, their can-do mindset keeps the team focused on making anything possible for their clients. Whether they’re learning new tools or collaborating with competitors to combine thier expertise, they will explore every avenue to meet joint goals. After completing an especially complex project, one client gave them a toy pig with wings saying: “With Six Feet Up, pigs truly can fly.”

They work hard at promoting best practices and automation. To this end, They have founded industry-leading events including the Python Web Conference, the largest worldwide event for web developers; IndyPy, the largest Python meetup in Indiana; and IndyAWS, Indiana’s fastest-growing cloud meetup.

Six Feet Up is a certified Women-Owned Business. They are also a gender-balanced software company and we couldn’t be happier to partner with such a great company!

Thank you Six Feet Up.

Are you a former Django Girls workshop attendee? We have great news for you. One of our global partners, Webucator, is offering free Python, Django, and HTML lessons to former Django Girls workshops attendees through a partnership with Django Girls.

The aim is to provide follow-up workshops that supplement the content in our Django Girls tutorial and provide more content for free for those who wish to continue learning to program after attending one of our workshops.

These follow-up workshops will be 100% remote, with the first one scheduled for January 22, 2022, from 10:00 to 16:00 ET, and will be facilitated by Noah Alorwu.

Noah Alorwu is a Software Engineer based in Ghana. He has been involved with Django Girls since 2017. He has coached and organized numerous Django Girls across Ghana and beyond. Currently, Noah is part of the Django Girls Foundation Advisory Board which helps to shape the future of Django Girls.

Noah loves to contribute his quota to the development of the tech ecosystem. He believes in bridging the gender disparities in tech and loves working on projects that help solve a problem. He is excited to be leading these fantastic workshops with Webucator and hopes to see you there!

For more details on the course content, please visit this link. Click here to apply for this amazing opportunity.

We are very excited to announce another awesome company joining us as Django Girls global partner, Webucator!

Webucator provides high-quality onsite and online training on technologies such as Python, Django, SQL, JavaScript, Java, SharePoint, Microsoft Office, Azure, Windows, Adobe, and much more.

Webucator’s Chief Information Officer, Nat Dunn, is the author of two books, Actionable Python and Actionable Django. Webucator is also a proud sponsor of The Python Software Foundation and The Django Software Foundation. You can read more about that and other things they support here.

Join the 14,985 organizations that have trusted Webucator with their training needs.

We are once again excited to have Caktus Group renewing their sponsorship as Django Girls global partner!

Caktus Group builds sharp web apps and prides itself on doing development the right way with a diverse and talented team. Using agile processes, they innovate, iterate, and deliver on time and on budget. Check out their blog for a variety of Django tips and helpful how-to’s.

Caktus is proud to support DjangoGirls and its mission to empower women and increase diversity in the tech industry. They are always on the lookout for talented Django developers to add to their close-knit team. Current job openings are listed on their careers page. Before the COVID pandemic, the team enjoyed working together at the Caktus headquarters in Durham, North Carolina. While all their work is done remotely, they regularly connect online to collaborate and have fun! 

Founded in 2007 by Django developers, Caktus specializes in custom web app development for a variety of businesses as well as healthcare, higher education, government, and nonprofits. Their projects positively impact millions of people worldwide.

Caktus Group supports the local community through a charitable giving program and by sponsoring tech meetups. They contribute to the broader tech community with various open source projects and by annually sponsoring events such as DjangoCon and PyCon. If you ever run into them at a conference, stop and say hello! You can also engage with Caktus on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and GitHub.

We are so excited to announce another awesome company joining as Django Girls global partner, Potato!

Potato is an award-winning digital product development studio with offices in London and San Francisco. They strive to build a supportive and inclusive environment where everyone can learn and grow while building and launching innovative, scalable products. 

Open Source and Django are fundamental to the architecture of their products, and Potato regularly releases and maintains the Open Source tools and libraries at the core of the highly scalable apps they build on Google’s Cloud platform.

Potato is currently looking for experienced Django developers to join its agile development team Read more here on the Potato jobs page.

Happy New Year to you all! 

We are at the start of another new year and we are fundraising! 

We went through some big changes in 2020. Our founders, Ola and Ola stepped down from running Django Girls, to pursue new ventures, and five new Trustees stepped up to continue running the Foundation. We also added support for remote workshops. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the whole world, we have suspended in-person workshops to ensure the safety of our organisers, volunteers, and participants, and have updated our resources to provide guidelines for organising remote workshops to allow our work to continue.

Our focus and mission for the upcoming year is in improving diversity and inclusion in Django Girls, ensuring our workshops are accessible to all, specifically including those from marginalised groups. 

We are looking for new sponsors to join our global partners, so if you have been thinking about it, now is your time to partner with us and support our work. There are many ways you can support us. These include once off donations through PayPal, monthly or annual donations through Patreon, or an annual corporate sponsorship. 

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

A brief biography, two to three sentences, about who you are, where you’re from, and the work you do.

Hello, I’m Anna. I’ve lived in Wrocław, Poland, all my life. I’m 23 years old and I graduated from the IT faculty of Wrocław University of Technology this year. I’ve worked as a programmer in Mirumee Software for over a year. It is a fast-growing company specializing in e-commerce. I write code in Python using the Django framework.

How did your story with code start?

My first steps with programming (apart from playing with HTML in elementary school) were at high school. I joined a specialized mathematical-IT class in which we learned C++ language, and I found that programming came to me quite easily. My classmates and I competed on the SPOJ platform, trying to solve as many problems as possible, as well as taking part in contests organized by Wrocław University. IT was an obvious choice for university and I knew it was the career for me—and that is just the way it worked out!

What do you love the most about coding?

I like doing things that can help make other people’s work easier, and programming lets me make that difference. I also love seeing the effects of my work immediately. Of course, it’s not always a quick process. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours or even days to solve some complicated problem, but finally achieving it gives me great satisfaction.

Why Django?

I came across a lot of languages and frameworks during my studies. I liked C++ at first. It was the first language that I worked with and I appreciated its obvious syntax (even if it’s sometimes hard to understand at first glance) and it’s well-organized code. It was a good background to gain a deeper understanding of the wider concepts of programming. I even worked as a C++ developer, but it was not my dream job.

My path changed when I came across web applications. It showed me the ‘other side’ of programming. I tried many languages but Django impressed me with its simplicity and ease of use. It’s written in Python and they both have a number of helpful packages that speed up work, as well as a large and engaged community of people providing answers to common problems. And I like how quickly-written code can generate fast, visible effects.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

The most interesting project was Saleor, an e-commerce platform written in Django and JavaScript. It’s an open-source project and it was really important to write high-quality code. I learned a lot during the 8 months I spent working on Saleor. I’m now working on another interesting, fast-growing e-commerce project. The online store was based on the older versions of Python and Django and we are in the process of migrating to the newest versions, so I am getting a good insight into the past and future of both technologies.

What are you the most proud of?

It’s not always easy to find a great job in your chosen field straight after graduating, but I’m very proud that I managed to do so. I really recommend the path I took. Working in IT is a very desirable career option nowadays; there is a relatively low chance of finding yourself without work, it offers a stable life, and there is also the chance to spread your wings if you want to explore some remote job offer in another country ;)

What are you curious about?

I love cooking after work. I used to be passionate about baking cakes (even some fancy, decorated ones) and other sweets, but now I’ve discovered savoury food and I’m trying out some more or less classic recipes.

I recently got to be a mentor for Django Girls Wroclaw at their workshop. It was a fun and rewarding experience in helping other people start out on their journey with coding. It was really nice to give something back to the community.

And, like other programmers, I love cats!

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

We are once again excited to announce another great company joining us as Django Girls Global Partner, Niteo GmbH! 

Niteo is a remote-first SaaS company with team members from the US, Slovenia, Ukraine, India, Norway, Guatemala, Japan, and the Philippines. They live and breathe Open Source and you can see their releases and contributions here https://niteo.co/projects.

Niteo is a remote-working company who are passionate about building relationships between colleagues. As such, they arrange bi-annual in-person meetups where the team go away together for a week and have some fun! These in-person meetups have been vital to Niteo as they have grown, as they believe that building quality relationships between staff makes a huge difference to the experience of remote working during the rest of the year.

Would you like to help shape the future of Django Girls? We are looking for people to join our advisory board and help us do exactly that!

Our focus for 2021 is on improving diversity and inclusion. This means ensuring our values, our mission, our website, our workshops and our processes are accessible to everyone, especially those from marginalized groups. To help us do this, and to make Django Girls continue as an organization who leads the way for diversity and inclusion, we need to make sure that marginalized voices are heard, and have a pivotal role in shaping our community.

Who can join the advisory board

Anyone aged 18 or over can apply to join, but we especially encourage applications from marginalized groups. 

This could mean that you are a person with disabilities, you are trans or non-binary, you are a person of colour, or you come from a developing country where there might be additional barriers to accessing programming education or jobs in technology. 

You don’t have to already be a member of the Django Girls community, but it helps if you are at least familiar with our work and what we do.

What does a member of the advisory board do?

Trustees try to hold update meetings at least once every 3 months, and members of the advisory board are invited to join us (although you don’t have to come to every meeting). 

Agendas and actions from meetings will be shared with all members of the advisory board and members are free to provide additional comments, recommended actions or items for discussion at future meetings.

At any time members of the advisory board can contact trustees with concerns, suggestions or advice, and can request a meeting with trustees to discuss this.

Are advisory board positions paid?

No. All advisory board members are volunteers. Becuase of this we try to keep our time requirements low.

How long do I have to agree to join the board for?

We would like everyone to commit for a minimum of 6 months. After 6 months, members will be asked if they would like to continue, and are given the option to step down if they wish to do so.

How many positions are available on the board?

The number of positions is not firmly set. We don’t want to have to reject applications from people who can help make a difference because there aren’t enough spaces. We will offer positions to people who can best support us and help us grow.

How will my application be assessed?

Applications for the advisory board will be processed in a similar way to how we process workshop applications. Applications will be anonymised and trustees will review all applications separately, scoring them from 1 to 5. Scoring will be based on the following criteria;

What is the benefit to Django Girls?

Does that applicant really want to be more involved with Django Girls?

Does the applicant provide insight into a specific area of diversity and inclusion?

Does the applicant have specific ideas on how to improve or shape the future of Django Girls?

What is the application timeline?

The deadline for applications is the 18th December 2020 and we hope to contact applicants with a decision in January 2021.

How can I apply?