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

Through hard work and a little bit of fairy dust, Erika transformed from hairdresser to righteous developer. She reports from Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she is active in her local learning communitiy which teaches girls about coding and how to do it.

How did your story with code start?

It started out at the Faculty for Information and Computer Science here in Ljubljana. It was the first place that I encountered my first for loop. It was mind boggling in all honesty. At that time I remember thinking to myself: “What the @#$! I got myself into? What the @#$! is a for loop anyway, and why did I wanted to be here at all?”. All the way through the university I had been working super hard, trying to take additional classes or join study groups. This was before online learning courses that one can take nowadays. So my student years were not all party all the time, because I have been studying and devoting my time to it very religiously. The best thing about it is that I didn’t even mind it, I loved to learn about code and algorithms and the rest. I know, it is a first symptom of a geek in the making, and boy did I have it.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

Ah, I am a person of many interests, but I did start out at a hairdressing school. I worked in hairdressing salons in Ljubljana for just a little while, just to get the hang of things and I managed to keep all the ears attached to the heads that I was cutting hair on. I moved on to try myself out in sales, but it turns out that I couldn’t sell a bucket of water to a bloke in burning trousers. Not to mention that I hated it. I had also spend some time working social spheres and worked on a project that helped young addicts to get reintegrated back to society which was the last step of their rehab program. We were writing CVs and learn things for school with the ones that went back to school. I was always trying to encourage them to adopt the mindset of “I want to do _______(fill in the blank with what you wish to do in life), and I am ready to work hard to get there”. So I had decided to practice what I preach, and enrolled at the university at my tender age of 27. Of course i couldn’t just transit from hairdressing school to university, so i had to finish two more schools before that, which gave me the study habits that I needed for the university.

What do you love the most about coding?

I love the mind challenges that it gives me. Trough time of course they get more complicated and demanding, which is OK, because in this way I can see my progress and ability of solving problems with code. A few more years and I will get over the imposter syndrome :). And also, there is a nice side effect of being a programmer, now I have many very interesting friends to which I can speak about all sorts of things. It turns out that very rarely developers have only one interest - development. In fact almost everyone has at least one but usually more hobbies, like cycling, diving, dancing, playing instruments,… So there is always a lot to talk about when we don’t talk about development.

Why Django?

I have encountered with Django more or less by accident. The company I had been employed by at the beginning of my career was using Django for their projects. In retrospective I do have to say that this was a wise decision on their part, because Django is just simply awesome and it was very suitable for their project. Python is the type of language that is quite easy to learn, I should know, I was working with java and PHP before. Django has a very great balance between offering built-in functionalities and giving the ability of figuring out best configuration for your project. In short, it does make you think a bit about which parts and how to use it. I like that, because automagic frightens me sometimes and it gives me the feeling that I am cheating, that am not really doing enough.

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

A good portion of the year, I was working on a project Codeweek EU, which is actually built with Django. I am one of the developers that developed this open source application and enable people to be a part of codeweek EU initiative, helping us spread the knowledge about software development. This project is something special for me as it was built through a local coding group with a lot of help from people who are just learning their first for loops.

What are you the most proud of?

The fact that I am still sticking to it and the way it looks I am going to be sticking with it for a very long time. Software development is my passion. I know this now.

What are you curious about?

I am curious about everything. Even cooking…

I like to fill my head with weird facts. For example, did you know: The largest snowflake ever recorded reportedly measured 38 centimeters across?

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

Sometimes I hike, I almost bought a bike this summer and I really like to perform badly at a karaoke party singing one of the goldies from the eighties. Yeah, I rickroll people sometimes.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

First dip your toes and then submerge! Don’t be afraid of people telling you that something is hard, because you know you can handle it. It’s mind boggling but it is just as much fun.

Thanks Erika! :)