The day I almost became a programmer

My colleague and I, two dreipol girls with a commercial background, dove into the world of HTML, CSS, Python and Django. In a workshop with Django Girls Zürich, we learned that you do not need to have superpowers to be a programmer. Or do you?

Marina Holenstein
dreipol

--

Visit www.dreipol.ch to learn more about us.

Django Girls is a non-profit organization founded by female programmers who love Python and Django and who want to bring more women into the world of technology.

Being employed for a design and development agency, my colleague Paola and I work closely with our programmers on a daily basis. When we heard about the upcoming Django Girls workshop, we decided to grab the chance: Why, after all, shouldn’t we learn something new and get a more detailed idea of what our colleagues in the dev department are working with?

Paola is a Project Manager and myself, Marina, an Office Manager. We both have a commercial background. So, of course, we know how to deal with computers. But programming? Well, that’s a whole different story. Nevertheless, we were confident and motivated when we signed up with Django Girls Zürich for their annually held two-day workshop.

Day 1 — HTML and CSS

The overall goal of the workshop was to set up our own blog. Our first impression on the very first day: Free breakfast, a nice location, and fine people. Not a bad way to start the workshop. After a short introduction to the tools we were going to be using, we already started to write our first lines of code.

The Django Girls tutorial lead us to step by step towards our first blog. When a problem arose (which actually happened quite often), the coaches, who all worked on a voluntary basis, were very helpful and patient. On this first day, we mostly used HTML and CSS. Honestly, by the end of the day, we felt like we were already able to understand our dreipol developers a little better. It was fascinating to realize how coding can completely absorb you.

At 5 pm, our heads were spinning but we were happy and proud of ourselves — and we were looking forward to the next day. But first, it was time to grab a beer.

Day 2 — Python and Django

Getting up on a Sunday morning at 8 am is NOT nice. Sorry, not even for coding. But we managed to get out of bed, willing to step into the world of programming again. So were the others and we started the second day at 9 am sharp. On Sunday’s program: Python and Django. We didn’t know if it was just because we were tired but these topics seemed much harder than those on Saturday. Nevertheless, after a little while, our own first blog was finally online. Yeah! 👏🏼

Recap

So, what were the takeaways from these two days? In only 48 hours, we were able to write our first lines of code and created our first blog by using HTML, CSS, Python and Django. It was a lot of fun — but, honestly speaking, also quite hard.

Nevertheless, we were surprised how fast we managed to understand the basics of Python and Django. And we have to say: Learning the basics of programming is no rocket science. Yes, of course, it’s only the basics. What is for sure, though, the workshop helped us a lot to understand the daily life of our colleagues at dreipol. Who knows, probably our very first own website will be online soon, too :-)

About Django Girls
Django Girls workshops are taking place regularly. The next workshop in Switzerland will be organized by Django Girls Basel during the
EuroPython conference week and will be held on Monday, 8th of July. Check this link for more details and to register for the happening.

. . .

Feel free to like this post, share it, follow me or dreipol on Social Media:

medium.com/@marina.holenstein
twitter.com/dreipol
www.dreipol.ch

--

--