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

Sorcha is a Python backend developer, as of a bit more than half a year ago, and loves her job. She is also someone’s wife and someone’s mammy. She has more hobbies than she really has time for and spends too much time on the internet.

How did your story with code start?

My code story started not long after I learned to read, typing BASIC programs up on the computer I was lucky enough to have in my house (my Dad’s a programmer) to draw pictures to the screen. In school we did some Logo stuff, and I had a lot of fun telling the little turtle on the screen where to move to and when to lift or put down its ‘pen’. My first introduction to a ‘real’ programming language (C++) was when my sister, two years ahead of me, came home from college wanting to show off what she’d learned. I loved it immediately. I did Computer Science and Software Engineering in college, and always really enjoyed the coding modules.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

Well, as you can see from the answer to the last question, I have kinda always been a programmer. But for seven and a half years before working as a programmer I worked in SAP, as a Service and Support Consultant. I logged on to large customer systems, had a poke around and sent the customer a report telling them how to improve the performance of their systems.

What do you love the most about coding?

I love the ‘aha’ moments where something suddenly makes sense and works after not working for some time. I love feeling smart and powerful when I can make a computer do what I want it to do.

Why Django?

When I decided a few years ago to become a professional programmer, my brother in law and mentor recommended Python. I fell deeply in love with Python. Django is the Python web framework recommended by a lot of Python people.

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

One of my other hobbies is LARPing at the Academy of Eblana (http://iga.ie/events/academy/) LARPs. I’m working on a Mamba (https://github.com/PyMamba/mamba-framework) (sorry Django!) system with a mysql DB to represent all the various elements of the game.

What are you the most proud of?

I wrote some code to integrate a third party API for age verification into our systems. I worked with a bunch of other developers to build that integration up and work it into the front end. It is now actually live and being really used by our actual customers.

What are you curious about?

Most things!

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

I run, swing dance, blues dance, play board games, LARP, knit, play computer games, and read the internet. Oh, and I write code! Sometimes I eat or sleep.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

I do indeed. I recently gave a lightning talk on this very subject. The slides are here:

http://slides.com/sorchabowler/bootstrapping-a-programming-career/#/

and the video is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4MMSjMOP6g#t=2940



Thanks Sorcha! :)