As a team, we are keen to support initiatives like Django Girls Wrocław Group. They give total beginners an opportunity to learn basic program skills by organizing a free two-day workshop about building Internet websites.

Although communication about the event is addressed to women, we invite everyone who is interested in programming. Among the participants are teenagers, young mothers and people in retirement age

— Aleksandra Ciapała, workshop organizer.

Learning new skills is much easier when IT companies and the community are active and open-minded to support such activities. Django Girls has invited mentors from the top IT companies in the region to cooperate with.

Tomasz Wąsiński, one of our software engineers, has joined Django Girls Workshop as a mentor. We asked him a few questions about the event.

Why have you decided to become a mentor?

Tomasz Wąsiński: I would like to see more women coders. Diverse teams mean more points of view, increase creativity in solving problems. I always enjoyed sharing knowledge and my enthusiasm for programming. Mentoring is one of the ways. It’s my first time in such a role, so I’m quite excited.

What does the workshop look like?

TW: Participants are invited to complete a beginner-friendly tutorial. They will create a simple blog website. I will be there to help them with any issues and questions, starting from preparing the development environment up to the deployment of the application. Many different problems may arise, but we will solve them step by step together.

What is the biggest challenge in workshops like this?

TW: Django Girls Workshop is dedicated to complete beginners. The only requirement is motivation. There are no other prerequisites, so mentors need to be prepared that participants will ask about nuts and bolts. Mentors should have endless patience and the ability to explain the basics in a straightforward way.

My mission as a mentor is to give some tools and general knowledge about how and where to find more information and help for their future projects after the workshop. I hope the attendants will be even more motivated and curious about programming than before the event.

Tomasz Wąsiński is a software engineer experienced in a back-end development. Django was the first Web framework that he had learned. He enjoys building scalable and maintainable applications according to clean architecture and Domain Driven Design principles.

Django Girls is a non-profit organization and a community that empowers and helps women to organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources, and support.