Coaching at Django Girls Bordeaux

Last week, I’ve been part of the fourth Django girls Bordeaux event as coach. The promise of this event is to help the participants create their own personal blog using python and Django. Participation is only limited to girls, hence the name. I approached the event as an opportunity to challenge my teaching skills: I’ve been collaborating with developers for years throughout computer science school and work, but I never had the opportunity to explain advanced programming concepts to a non technical audience. I was quite stressed about it..  So, as any good developer, I started by reading the manual. Luckily, the community wrote a great tutorial for the girls to follow, and a good guide book for coaches on how to behave during the day. In few words, it just says: Don’t be a smart ass!

I think the greatest thing about the day was seeing people from different ages and disciplines trying to learn how to code: Frowning upon the tutorial, making sense of command lines, the python interpreters and programming basics. Of course, most of them didn’t finish the tutorial, but some did and all seemed happy with the experience.

I feel like this approach to programming is like watching an action movie that starts in the middle of heated action scene where the viewer doesn’t understand what’s really happening. Then, the actual movie starts and characters are introduced properly and an hour later, you get back to the exact same scene from the start, but now you understand everything. I think Django girls was that first scene for python programming: it introduces you (the participant) to lots of key programming concepts. And now that you saw all of it, and you’re still interested in learning how stuff really works, you can start from the beginning and learn the basics of python programming, the django framework and cool stuff with the support of your local community.

I encourage any programmer to be part of future Django girls events!