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

Danielle is a senior software engineer and architect at Infoxchange, an Australian technology not for profit working to reduce the digital divide. In her spare time she’s a bike mechanic, musician and political activist.

How did your story with code start?

My Dad taught me the basics of programming when I was quite young. Which would have been around the time the World Wide Web and the Linux kernel were being written. I started writing little games that were either too linear or too stochastic to be enjoyable.When the WWW came to Australia I put together a webpage full of under-construction gifs. Around 15 I was teaching myself Linux and Python and I learned how to write CGI scripts. I was probably the only 15 year old in the neighbourhood whose house had an Apache server running something they’d written.

I went to university to study engineering and computer science. I got involved with open source, mostly in the GNOME project. This landed me my first 2 jobs. I then became increasingly interested in using my skills to help people directly which took me to foreign aid and ultimately to Infoxchange, a technology not-for-profit working to improve digital inclusion and help other not-for-profits harness technology.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

Probably colouring in?

What do you love the most about coding?

Coding is a tool to create software. It’s a bit like asking why do you love hammers? What I love is creating. I love seeing a thing come to life and having people use it.

Why Django?

I was working as a scientific programmer and we needed an application for our intranet to help manage the hardcopy data (on tape). All of our applications to date had been Perl CGI done the hard way. Django had just been released and seemed like a natural choice for someone who enjoyed Python. I had the app together within a week.

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

In my spare time I’m working on a prototype of a new platform for progressive political organising built on Django and Elasticsearch.

What are you the most proud of?

The thing I’m most proud of is my most recent product at my job for Infoxchange. We rebuilt our aging community service directory into a modern, smart, web 2.0 search engine using Django and Elasticsearch. For the first time it has an API that allows us and other organisations access the data with all of the smart searching features. It was by far one of the most complex pieces of software I’ve ever worked on and required reading a significant amount of academic literature in the field of information retrieval. As well as solving some purely engineering problems like importing and indexing all of the data from the old database.

What are you curious about?

About using technology to help people. In all senses, not just software. I’m also intrigued by hidden relationships the data we know but don’t know that we know.

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

I volunteer as a bike mechanic. I’m also volunteering for the Greens party in the lead up to our upcoming state election. I’m trying to start a new band.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Get involved in open source. Not just using, but contributing. I learned more from writing open source through code reviews and technical discussions than I did in six years of uni. Because of open source I began my first job with a better understanding of revision control, architecture and code quality than many people already there.

Thanks Danielle! :)