I’m a bit late to the party with this because I’ve been swamped with work but I really wanted to share this great new nonprofit organisation I found recently. Django Girls is a South African organisation that has started in Johannesburg. It has a pretty simple objective:
To introduce South African girls to programming and equip them with basic skills to start building websites and blogs.
Django Girls kicked off with some key workshops in Johannesburg. At the beginning of March ladies were able to attend and learn all about building websites and blogs in HTML, CSS and Python. The team took it a step further with basic tutorial classes. For ladies who attended, they could join a slack group afterwards to get more assistance with the tutorials and improve their skills further.
I’ve been pretty passionate about teaching girls to code for a long time and I think this is such a great initiative. There are set to be more workshops over the next few months and they’re free for any ladies interested in learning the basics. There are usually 30 spaces available at each Django Girls workshop so ideally you’ll want to sign up via their Facebook page so you can get notifications when the workshops happen. There are also some pretty impressive sponsors getting behind this one. Amazon, Google, Praekelt and the Python Software Foundation have shown support as has JoziHub and Thoughtworks.
The first Django Girls Workshops happened early March but there are set to be more and I’m stoked a local organisation is doing something like this for ladies in South Africa. The current events are held in Johannesburg but there should be more soon.
Have you learnt to code yet? What resources did you use? Drop them in the comments below and lets help each other grow our knowledge base.
