Your Django Story: Meet Ola Sendecka

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

Ola is one of the founders of Django Girls. She is self-employed and works as a web developer and lives in Kraków, Poland.

How did your story with code start?

When I was in high school, I was interested a little bit in graphics. I was thinking about computer graphics as a possible career and decided to study Computer Science at Jagiellonian University.

When I decided I want to study CS I had absolutely no idea what programming is all about. We had only a little bit of Visual Basic at school. All I knew is that in the middle school I loved HTML and playing with Flash (especially with ActionScript). And I was ambitious and I liked Math a lot, so I asked myself: why not? It seemed cool. I was the only female taking the CS exam that year in my school.

In the end I don’t do anything connected to graphics right now, but during the studies I discovered that programming is a thing for me: it’s logical, organised and beautiful. It perfectly fits me!

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was a normal high school student who didn’t know what to do in life :). I loved science as well as humanities. However, I didn’t like to memorize too many things, so Math-related things were on top of my list when I thought about my future career.

What do you love the most about coding?

I love that being a programmer means that I am a problem solver. I’m a type of person who loves fixing things. I also love to create. Programming has both. It is also organised and logical.

Programming is a great tool to build things. And I think that I always wanted to build something.

Why Django?

During my CS studies we had the freedom of choosing the programming language we want to use to implement some projects. I started writing projects in Python. Computer simulation? Python was great! Writing your own parser? No problem for Python! Web application? Why not using CherryPy?

Then, my boyfriend started to talk about Django and I decided to write my Bachelor project with it. And every time I thought something would be a lot of work - Django had it out of the box: authentication, admin and many, many more. It was awesome! This is how I fell in love with Django. I think it was Django 1.0.

Then I went for my first Django conference: DjangoCon Amsterdam. I had written only one project in Django till that time. I felt I am the dumbest person there. Everybody knew so much! But then I met friendly people who said to me: “We are here for you. If you have any questions - we will help you!”. And during a Django sprint I did my first Django contributions - including some ORM bug fixes - and I was super proud of myself! The awesome community made me believe that I am capable of doing cool stuff!

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

I don’t know yet. I am still in the middle of Django Girls :). And I don’t like to plan too much in advance.

What are you the most proud of?

It’s a difficult question. I am proud of being a member of a such wonderful Python community. I am proud I organised DjangoCon in Warsaw with great people. I am proud of Django Girls. I can find many, many things I am proud of: it could be fixing a bug for a client at work today, writing some cool piece of code or contributing to open source.

What are you curious about?

It depends on the day :). One day I’m watching all Physic-related Youtube channels I can find on the Internet. Another I’m checking out how to bake your own bread - actually I was making my own bread when I was in Scotland for a year. I’m curious about how things work or, to be precise, how to make things. For example, in a few days I’m attending a one-day woodwork workshops and I’m super excited about it!

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

As I mentioned, I like to know how to make things. I love to test stuff. It could be polymer clay, soutache, screen printing, vector graphics or Arduino. The only problem is that after a moment I’m bored and I need to find something new to try.

I could list things I love to do in my free time, but you cannot call them a hobby: reading, watching movies, playing board games, fitness, travelling.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

It is very hard at the beginning when we know almost nothing. The worst thing is that it is hard to ask good questions. We don’t know what we don’t know :). All answers are there - you will find them on the Internet, books, you can ask people around you. But knowing what you want to know is crucial. So you don’t need to be perfect at the beginning. You will make many, many mistakes and that’s ok. You will improve. The best thing you could do is learning how to ask questions and how not to be afraid of asking them.

Thanks Ola! :)

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