Your Django Story: Meet Ana Balica
This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.
Ana is a non-ninja software developer from Moldova. In 2012 she started programming in Python and lived happily ever after. She doesn’t like coffee, but enjoys plenty of tea, adores cats and good stories.
How did your story with code start?
It was a sunny winter day. I entered the university and went straight to the second floor, where we had a little shared room for IT faculty students. “It’s empty”, I whispered. I hoped there won’t be many coming later since it’s winter vacation.
I picked up “C++ primer” from the bookshelf, sat closer to the window, took off my shoes and put my feet on the radiator. I opened the book on the first chapter and started reading. First time in life I saw a step-by-step description of the mechanism of creating new programs, a motivation to design a new language, an intro to programming paradigms.
It all started making sense to me. Around that time I began putting meaning into concepts like data, algorithm, variable, function, a simple “return” statement. Even though C++ never stuck with me, that book disseminated some of the mysteries I always fought to understand. Until then I was limited to putting words into a computer screen and pushing a magic button to show me a console output. That’s how I went through high school computer classes.
My code story began with this aha moment, that gave me the necessary understanding and confidence to dig deeper.
What did you do before becoming a programmer?
I graduated from College of Constructions in Chisinau, planning to become a civil engineer and continue my studies at the university. I was pretty serious in my intentions. While writing my final thesis I decided to switch to programming. There are several rational reasons behind my decision. Mainly it was market instability and seasonal work. Work in office was resembling routine, work on the site was hard and definitely not lady-inclusive.
What do you love the most about coding?
A lot of things! The thought process of making design decisions, going through the possible solutions, anticipating future changes and adapting the best decision. It gets more interesting when you learn more and more and your vision expands to unseen dimensions. I also like to watch experienced programmers going through the process and coming up with ideas.
Needless to say I like debugging. In fact it’s a skill I acquired due to programming. I keep my spirits high by ensuring myself the solution exists, I get equipped with my favourite tools and techniques and go brave into the bug hunt.
It might sound silly, but I also like typing. Since currently our main code input method is text, we type a lot. Even though I understand that the following method is extremely outdated and it’s a pity we didn’t adapt a more thought-like method for expressing our ideas in programs, I still like typing. Few years ago I have switched from QWERTY to Colemak layout. Colemak pitches you the idea of fast and pain-free typing. I sometimes hang out on typing.io and typeracer.com to practice the speed of my blind typing.
Furthermore I like coding, because it spreads over the whole world. It’s pretty awesome that we can work in international teams, collaborate and contribute to same code bases. In fact I truly believe the world of coding is inclusive and offers equal opportunities for everybody.
Why Django?
It all starts with an idea. Every year there is this one student who wants to make FAF (acronym of the speciality I studied) more visible. Obviously I volunteered to create a brand new website for FAF to tell the whole world how awesome it is to be a part of our community. I picked up Django fast and it felt very easy for common tasks. I didn’t do any web development before that, but I knew some stuff about client-server architecture and was already fluent in Python.
Over time I tried other frameworks, but the philosophy of Django is closest to my heart. It clicked with me. Now I can confidently say that I came for the batteries, but stayed for the community.
What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
For the last year I have been dedicating my free time to Systers Portal - it’s an open source project, a unified platform for Systers and its sub-groups to share information and get the latest news. Maybe it doesn’t sound as cool as making your own Enigma machine or creating the next viral 2048 game, but I see the coolness in its usefulness.
What are you the most proud of?
Being busy and delivering. When I was a student, I managed to build myself a schedule that I’ve been able to follow pretty well. I spent 6 hours at work in the office every day, around 5-6 hours at university, did my homework regularly, managed to spend some time with the loved ones, meet friends, do a little bit of volunteering, occasionally go for walks.
It’s not always like that, but the main rule is to be productive and get some results out of it.
What are you curious about?
In terms of programming, I’m curious about enhancing code quality. I can easily get stuck when naming entities or making a design decision. It would be so nice to develop more formal methods for making our linters smarter in identifying good and bad names. Who knows, that might be my next pet project.
Regarding other aspects of life, I’m curious about making life better from the inside. By inside I mean our thoughts and understanding of the world. I am in search of that peace of mind.
What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
I consider myself a savvy backpacker. Whether it’s a one-day trip in the nearby woods or a 6-months adventure in South East Asia, I’m on it!
Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
Seek mentorship. A mentor will help you grow faster than you can imagine. To the very least grab a friend and say “Please explain to me all the types of loops in C, because I don’t understand them.” That’s what I did :)
Thanks Ana! :)
