Django Girls Kathmandu Workshop - II Conducted Successfully; Application Open for Workshop

Django Girls Kathmandu is the coding workshop organized independently by Santosh Purbey (CTO, Bits Innovation) and Shankar Bhattarai (CEO, Bits Innovation), in partnership with Bits Innovation and Leapfrog Academy. Django Girls is a global, non-profit organization that helps girls get involved with technology and teach them about programming. This is the two-day event for Girls of all ages to give them a great first experience in software craftsmanship. Django Girls provided girls with the tools to understand technology along with the community and inspiration to get started.

Django Girls has already organized two of its workshops, the first on 31st July followed by the second workshop on 19-20th August. The organizing team consisted of altogether 5 members. Santosh Purbey, Shankar Bhattarai, Ribhu Luitel, Shreelata Wagle and Deepti Gautam were the members of the core organizing team. The workshop was sponsored by Leapfrog Academy.

About Workshop – II

Django Girls Kathmandu Workshop – II started with around 40 participants. Altogether around 80 interested candidates applied to be a part of the workshop out of which only 40 got selected. The two-day event started with the welcome speech by Ms. Shreelata Wagle at around 10:50am followed by a speech by Mr. Dixanta Bahadur Shrestha, CEO, Leapfrog Academy. After that, Mr. Chandan Goopta, Data Science Researcher, Python Django developer, gave a motivational speech which boosted up all the girls. At around 12:30pm, introduction session began with a fun game. The formal workshop began after 2pm, in which the installation and project setup was done.

The next day began with Django Coding where the girls engaged themselves in building a blog using Django framework. At the end of the event, Mr Sudip Kafle, Python and Django developer, Cofounder at Phunka Technologies motivated the girls with his wonderful speech. The program was concluded after distributing “Certificate of Awesomeness” to all the participants.

In the workshop, I interviewed two of the participants, Ms. Rojina Deuja and Ms. Ruby Shrestha. Here’s what they had to say about the workshop,

Rojina Deuja, “The workshop was a total package. Inspiring speakers kick-started the first day. It was a motivating session. The coding part too was great fun and a little bit challenging as Python was completely new to me. But two day’s constant input made it better. A big thank you to Santosh Purbey dai and Leapfrog academy.”

Ruby Shrestha, “Django workshop for girls was an interesting experience. Not only did I learn the basics of Django, but I also got an opportunity to meet girls with interest that collided with mine, the interest in programming and software development.

What I liked about the entire session was the eagerness and patience of the mentor in teaching every little detail about the framework. Certainly, there were questions fired at the mentor from a lot of attendees, but the questions were handled well. What I think can be improved from the next Django workshop onwards is that a single workshop day should not be dedicated to installation. This shall help to increase the workshop productivity.

Overall, it was a great learning experience!”

My Take

All in all, the experience was great. Django Girls Kathmandu – Workshop II was the first programming workshop I attended. What I loved about the whole session was the energy and persistence of the guide in educating each and every insight about the structure. Despite the presence of a large number of participants and less number of mentors, the event was handled well. There were lots of questions and interaction from the participant’s side as well as the organizing committee.

The only problem was the lack of sufficient time. A single day was dedicated for installation only which could’ve been done from home itself. In order to build the workshop efficiency, establishment procedures and requirements can be sent to the probable participants through mail before the workshop days. This can save lots of time and effort. The saved time can be utilized for teaching coding to the participants.

Internet was an issue at the beginning of the workshop which was very annoying. But after some time, the organizing team dealt with the problem and managed to solve it soon enough. The program, all in all, was great. The mentors could hold the attention of every participant by sharing their insights in more justifiable and important way.

Thanks to people like Santosh Purbey, Shankar Bhattarai and all those who are the part of such great initiative that inspires young girls to learn to code and be involved in technology in one way or the other.

Django Girls Kathmandu Workshop – III

Django Girls Kathmandu is back with Django Girls Workshop #3. Django Girls Kathmandu is a two-day free workshop tailored for women who want to get involved with the technology and programming.

The application process is open from 4th September until 24th September, 2016. And the workshop is scheduled on 29-30th September.

Those who missed the chance of joining the workshop before, this is a golden opportunity for them. If you are a girl, have a laptop and interested in learning Python, Django and related technologies then, you are the suitable candidate for the workshop.

You can find more details about the workshop on this link: https://djangogirls.org/kathmandu/