Django Girls Brno

Hey guys! I think it’s been long enough and no more pics or videos are coming, so it’s time to write about my experience with Django girls. Me with our coach Anna from Budapest:

It was a 1 day workshop the day before PyCon and it took place in Fit Vut (Faculty of Information Technology). There were several reasons I applied for it:

• it’s free;
• it’s for women;
• you don’t have to be an experienced programmer. In fact the only requirement was to have a laptop;
• it’s an amazing opportunity to learn some code and get guidance;
• you can meet many great people from open source community.

I was so happy to get accepted and maybe just a little worried that I will not understand a thing 😀 Which, luckily wasn’t an issue, since we had coaches and meta coaches to help us with anything! Of course, knowing some Python and CSS helped. And as a nice surprise the organizers also got us all tickets to  PyCon CZ, which most of us attended the next day (I’ll get to that).

So let me tell you how it was.

First of all the venue was nice, spacious and sunny.

Second of all, we had unlimited coffee and snacks, including gluten-free options. Also lunch =) Special thank to Rebel beans guys for providing us with caffeine for the whole day (and following PyCon).

I think even if someone didn’t finish the tutorial we followed, they still enjoyed themselves and got a nice T-shirt. And what we did was this tut here. You can totally do it at home, but beware, that sometimes nothing works because of a forgotten semi-colon or wrong indentation. It takes an experienced eye of a meta coach about a second to notice that, but it would’ve taken me much much longer if I were by myself 😉

Here’s me hard at work:

 

Okay, everything is so sunny and perfect. Just one little thing: for an inexperienced in programming girl, which we all were, it is a very very long and challenging tutorial. Really. It would have been just fine to have a 2 days workshop =) Other than that it was awesome. Some more pics here on Facebook and here on Flickr.

And the next day was PyCon CZ. Surprisingly, you didn’t have to be super experienced in Python to enjoy it. I especially liked the second key-note by Russell-Keith Magee, who also happened to be meta coach the previous day. He talked about open source with such passion, that I honestly think he inspired some people to convert 🙂 Here’s the recording of his speech (and also all the others). Check them out! I especially recommend Python for particle hunters by Jarka Schovancová and also I’ve been told this one was pretty good and funny, too. After the whole day of Django girls and getting up bright and early for PyCon, I didn’t stay till the very last lecture.

The next day were moar workshops, but more complex = not for beginners, so I didn’t go. Can’t tell you about those, enjoy some pics instead =)

One of these days I’m hoping to go to a conference about design or something =) It’s such great atmosphere and interesting talks, I wish I could enjoy it to the fullest!