Django Girls Cape Town: Breaking Barriers to Code

Growing up I always wanted to help people. My father, a computer science teacher himself, encouraged me to do computer science at school. I was the only girl in my class. The issues I faced then are the same issues I believe keep many females away from the industry today: it’s hard to fit into a male dominated space where people have always taken men more seriously and assume they’re better.

I first learned about Django Girls in Namibia where I got asked to be a coach during their event at Pycon (a conference where people interested in the programming language, Python, gather to learn from each other). Django Girls is a non-profit organization that empowers and helps women who want to hold workshops to support other female coders. Founded just 2 years ago, it has now taken place in 177 cities in over 64 countries.

As a coach, I could see how the workshops broke misconceptions about computer science. The girls I coached were shocked at how quickly they were able to understand the code and surprised that it was not as intimidating as it first seemed. I remember one girl who had just finished school asking a ton of questions, wanting to explore code outside of the tutorial. After I explained a few basic coding principles she kept saying, ‘I can’t believe it’s that simple’.

I love the concept of Django Girls because it gives females a different experience with coding than they will find in a classroom or university setup. It’s an environment where females are the majority. Inspired, I looked into the feasibility of running a workshop in South Africa, and with the support of Praekelt, Lisa Adams (colleague and project manager at Praekelt) and I started a branch in Cape Town. We both believe that in a city and country that has so much poverty, computer science can propel the lives of women. Due to the lack of females in this industry, there are many bursaries available for females who want to study computer science, and many companies look to female developers to diversify their teams. With the growing tech industry, the opportunities are endless.

We were able to launch our first Django Girls event in May 2016 in Cape Town. We had 30 attendees and 10 coaches from different backgrounds and age groups, making the event a huge success with many of the girls wanting to learn more. Our aim for Django Girls Cape Town is to give females a great first experience with code so that if they are interested they can pursue this path with experience in hand. The tutorial that the girls complete during the workshop uses lanuages that we at Praekelt.org work with everyday. These are the same ones we use to build platforms like Molo, a set of tools for publishing mobi-sites for projects such as Girl Effect Mobile and BabyCentre.

I’m excited to announce we will be doing our second event next week alongside PyconZA at the RiverClub in Observatory, Cape Town on the 6th & 7th of October. We hope we are making a small step towards changing how the future of computer science looks in South Africa, and potentially the world.

Apply here to join our team of coders at Praekelt.

Contributed by Codie Roelf.