DjangoCon Europe 2016 - From Intern to Professional Developer: Advice on a Mid-Career Pivot
Speaker: Rebecca Conley (twitter) is a Django developer at Caktus.
History
Rebecca is passionate about dancing and fencing. Fencing was her first, very positive experience with entering a male dominated field driven by excitement and passion.
When she worked with her Master's Degree in Business Development, a teacher/mentor encouraged her to go into programming. She joined a Code School, and learned Rails.
She was afraid of a white male brogrammer culture, but found diversity and meaningful work with strong women in important positions. Even though she only knew Rails, she applied to Caktus, and got the internship and Caktus spent a lot of time on training and mentoring her on code of an actual project.
How?
People from other fields and careers can help us by joining us, because they provide different outlook, and diversify our community. PyLadies and Django Girls are already very much doing the right thing.
- Information: tell people about coding, and the communtiy. People don't know about that
- Encouragement: Ecourage others, encourage mistakes
- Training: Provide training, as in code schools, or Django Girls Workshops
- Mentorship: Be there. Provide Mentorship networks.
- Opportunity: Offer internships etc.