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

Susan is a software engineer at Piston, a cloud computing startup located in San Francisco. She likes to use Python-based web frameworks. Prior to Piston, she was a web applications engineer at Flixster with Rotten Tomatoes. She’s a core committer of a Django-based web application project at www.openhatch.org. Previously, she’s dabbled in fixing some bugs in Django and in the IPython notebook. She gives talks at various technology conferences such as PyCon. Susan loves to drink warm cups of oolong tea at grand elegant tea houses while reviewing pull requests.

How did your story with code start?

I learned how to code in my freshman year of college (Harvey Mudd College). Every incoming student, regardless of their intended major, had to take an intensive CS class. The coursework was taught in Python, a language that most beginners can grasp without being burdened by the syntax. The class assumed zero knowledge of programming principles and proceeded at a fast and challengingly fun pace. The first programming assignment of the first week was to program a robot to traverse a maze of any size and of any complexity, for example. The class covered a good introductory broad overview of the practical aspects of CS: control loops, recursion, object-oriented programming, functional programming, good UX design, to finite state machines and assembly language. I really liked that the class was structured with lots of short exercises and creative lab assignments that encouraged collaboration between students. Much of the post-2010 CS curriculum at Mudd has been covered in mainstream press releases such as here.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was a college student. I was very briefly an electrical engineer, working on a summer internship that involved Arduinos and motors at Beckman Coulter, a gigantic multi-national biomedical diagnostics company headquartered in Southern California. In the first week of my internship, I realized that I hated being in large tech companies that have greater than 500 employees, which is ironically, the only type of place where electrical engineers can be found. So, after I finished my summer internship in Southern California, I travelled to San Francisco, where I attended a 10-week fast-paced all-women development bootcamp, and afterwards, I started my first software job at a well-known movie tech company. I ended up staying and living in San Francisco, where I currently work as a software engineer at a cloud computing startup of less than 100 employees.

What do you love the most about coding?

Elegance and collaboration. There is always more than one way to code a solution and there is always a more elegant or more simpler solution in any set of given product requirements. I like the process of refining a prototype to the point where a large mess of 500 lines of code can be refactored or simplified down to ten readable lines. The process of refactoring is almost always collaborative. Working with the brightest minds who review my code and offer feedback in code review is the most fun intellectual experience for any software engineer looking to improve.

Why Django?

Because engineers are lazy and do like the convenience of using Django, its pre-built necessary extensions such as auth and admin, a Python framework that is easy to learn, is well-documented, and has been tried and proven in thousands of web sites.

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

I’ve been working on improving the test infrastructure behind the codebase of www.openhatch.org, a Django web application. As a core committer on this Python web application project, I’ve also been reviewing other people’s pull requests submitted to Open Hatch on Github and helping them improve. I also plan to do more infrastructure-level tasks on Open Hatch, such as a Django upgrade or performance optimizations.

What are you the most proud of?

I am proud of my collection of configurations files: vim config, bash config, and git config files, which make programming a ton more convenient and easier. I use a lot of git aliases. I like to configure every command-line tool that I use to make me more productive.

What are you curious about?

I am curious about the different types of tea and methods of brewing tea.

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

I love to drink warm cups of oolong tea at grand elegant tea houses while reviewing pull requests or reading a book. I am occasionally visiting tea stores in Chinatown or in Pacific Heights in San Francisco, trying out a cup of new oolong tea.

I am also a dedicated amateur ballet dancer who takes classes and spectates local professional-level ballet performances in San Francisco.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Surround yourself with other programmers, particularly those in the open source community. Join an open source project that you love and admire and start to contribute to a project. You’ll learn a great deal of software best practices and meet lots of new smart people in FOSS projects. One good way to start is to look at the directory of FOSS projects on www.openhatch.org and contact #openhatch on freenode if you have questions.

Thanks Susan! :)