My experience of mentoring at Django Girls Bangalore 2017

This blog post was written by Jaysinh Shukla. Thank you, Jaysinh :)

Last Sunday, Django Girls Bangalore organized a hands-on session of web programming. This is a small event report from my side.

Detailed overview

Django Girls is not for a profit initiative led by Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka. Such movement helps women to learn the skills of website development using the well-known web-framework Django. This community is backed by organizers from many countries. Organizations like The Python Software Foundation, Github, DjangoProject and much more are funding Django Girls.

Django Girls Bangalore chapter was organized by Sourav Singh and Kumar Anirudha. This was my second time mentoring for the Django Girls event. First was the Ahmedabad chapter. The venue was sponsored by HackerEarth. 8 male and 2 female mentored 21 women during this event. Each mentor was assigned to 3 participants. Introducing participants with web development becomes easy with the help of Django Girls handbook. The Django Girls handbook is a combination of beginner-friendly hands-on tutorials described in a simple language. The handbook contains tutorials on basics of Python programming language to deploy your web application. Pupils under me were already ready by pre-configuring Python with their workstation. We started by introducing our selves. We took some time browsing the website of undersea cables. One of the amusing questions I got is, “Isn’t the world connected with Satellites?”. My team was comfortable with the Python, so we quickly skimmed to the part where I introduced them to the basics of web and then Django. I noticed mentors were progressing according to the convenience of participants. Nice amount of time was invested in discussing raised queries. During illumination, we heard a loud call for the lunch. A decent meal was served to all the members. I networked with other mentors and participants during the break. Post-lunch we created a blog app and configured it with our existing project. Overview of Django models topped with the concept of ORM became the arduous task to explain. With the time as a constraint, I focused on admin panel and taught girls about deploying their websites to PythonAnywhere. I am happy with the hard work done by my team. They were able to demonstrate what they did to the world. I was more joyful than them for such achievement.

The closing ceremony turned amusing event for us. 10 copies of Two scoops of Django book were distributed to the participants chosen by random draw strategy. I solemnly thank the authors of the book and Pothi.com for gifting such a nice reference. Participants shared their experiences of the day. Mentors pinpointed helpful resources to look after. They insisted girls would not stop at this point and open their wings by developing websites using skills they learned. T-shirts, stickers and badges were distributed as event swags.

You can find the list of all Django Girls chapters here. Djangonauts are encouraged to become a mentor for Django Girls events in your town. If you can’t find any in your town, I encourage you to take the responsibility and organize one for your town. If you are already a part of Django Girls community, Why are you not sharing your experience with others?

Proofreaders: Kushal Das, Dhavan Vaidya, Isaul Vargas

Django Girls is a non-profit that teaches programming to women all around the world. Want to help us? Support us!