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

Political analyst turned coder, Lorena Mesa works as a platform software engineer at Sprout Social and is a co-organizer for PyLadies Chicago. Lorena loves to make meaning out of data, asking big questions and using her code to build models to derive that meaning. Part Star Wars fanatic but mostly a Trekkie, Lorena abides by the motto to “live long and prosper”.

How did your story with code start?

I interned with President Obama’s first presidential campaign in the Latino Vote team. Working in the national headquarters (and in the field) I was responsible for managing parts of our voter outreach campaigns. Until then I had never written a line of code before, but with the scale of data we were working with for tracking and running analytics on our campaigns I soon had to pick up some basic SQL which lead to me learning how to do some basic R. I had never seen a political campaign that had such a real impact on the day to day lives of people and I attribute in large part to the coding competency of the staff and interns. After my time on the campaign I continued to learn how to code in grad school, working with GIS and R to finish my master’s thesis.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was a policy analyst before I became a programmer. While I did not “code” in the way that software engineers do, I did work with tools that required me to be competent in things like Math Lab or SQL.

What do you love the most about coding?

Creating tools to empower others to do exciting and new things! It is amazing how you can translate an idea into a functional prototype within a matter of days.

Why Django?

I work professionally with Django but outside of work I found that it is a highly versatile framework, you can use it as a pure API or in small projects like the blog you create in Django Girls. Not only that but the people who use Django are very interesting themselves - Django is not only a web framework but a tool that people who solve problems use.

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

Planning a Python Open Source workshop with Write/Speak/Code. Ideally we will hack on some of the issues for Django!

What are you the most proud of?

I’m really excited that I didn’t stop learning once I knew what “coding” was or once I got my first job as a software engineer. Learning is a lifelong thing, if you don’t love what you do then there may be a problem. Luckily my love of learning led me to code and code is something that never stops giving.

What are you curious about?

Data Science! I’ve been taking an edX Intro to Machine Learning class and recently gave a talk on a white paper evaluating the efficiency of Naive Bayes. My background in policy had me working with data so I would love to return in some regard to that.

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

I’ve completed the Chicago Marathon eight times now so I can safely say running, particularly distance running, is a hobby of mine. I’ll be taking it to a new level this year by participating in Napa Valley’s Ragnar race - an overnight relay race with lots of hills and excitement :D.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Stop obsessing over “is this right”, reading endless blogs and books is going to keep you from writing code. While you should definitely read technical publications you should immediately put that to work on a pet project. For example - do you like to write? Make a blog! Curious about how to develop a game? Make one! Health fanatic? Make an calorie counter website that uses Google Maps API to route “which route can I burn the most calories on”. There are many ways to start and if you aren’t sure, attend a MeetUp, find an online user group – ASK QUESTIONS and find a mentor!

Thanks Lorena! :)