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

Filipa is a software developer from Portugal, living in Slovakia and working for a Finnish company with Python and Django.

How did your story with code start?

While my sister was applying for university in 2001 I got a glance at the book with the list of courses. I somehow decided I also wanted to apply to some course in the new campus close to where I was living. They only had Computer Science so I went for it. I took the exams again and entered. As I was working in a school I couldn’t go to many lessons. I remember after few months that some teacher was talking about code and I felt really bad that I didn’t know what it was. Later I found out that it was not about morse or da Vinci code ;)

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was a Physical Education teacher. I taught for 5 years in Portuguese schools, from kindergarten to high school.

What do you love the most about coding?

The possibility to see the result of my work very fast. I used to work in education so the results of my work could take weeks, months or even years to be visible (if they were). When you program you can see it immediately. I got addicted to this.

Why Django?

In 2007 I was working in a bank and my team leader was doing a lot of things with python even though we were supposed to be developing in .net. Once I had to make some script and he told me to do it in python. I had no idea how to do it. I started to learn online, made the script and then never stopped. Django came naturally as one of the web frameworks made with python.

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

I am the kind of developer that has no side projects. It is a pity but I simply can’t do it together with a full time job. I have many ideas but I never manage to do something. I used to feel sorry but now I accept it. It is not mandatory to have side projects but maybe soon I will manage to do something useful :)

What are you the most proud of?

I think the fact that I improved in coding. In my first job I was pretty bad and even after finishing the degree it took me some time until I really started feeling I knew what I was doing. Now I can learn many news things faster, I have opinions and it is not difficult anymore to read technical articles.

What are you curious about?

Most of the time about how something works, about the reason why something is as it is and also about history. I am also curious about how people learn and I have studied this topic while I was a teacher.

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

Right now my free time is spend with my 8 months old son. We go for walks, play with toys and read kids books. In the old days I did a lot of sports, especially volleyball and biking. I used to play guitar. I play a lot of board games and I am very interested in backgammon. Me and my boyfriend spent hundreds of hours playing for money online and analysing games to improve our skills. The profit always went to new appliances to our home: blender, waffle maker and other. Lately I started going to pub quizzes and got addicted.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Yes. Read code and do concrete projects. Do not be scared if you don’t understand everything.

Thanks Filipa! :)