This week we welcome Veronica Hanus (@veronica_hanus) as our PyDev of the Week! Veronica is a regular tech speaker at Python and other tech conferences and meetups. You can see some of her talks and her schedule on her website. She has been active in the Python community for the past few years. Let’s take a few moments to get to know her better!
Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):
I enjoy writing and taking pictures. For me, the challenge is to help someone feel what I was feeling when I decided the moment was a picture- or story-worthy, and both take a combination of skill-that-you-can-study and plain-old-caring that I find immensely rewarding. Photo-taking excursions are one of my favorite ways to spend time with friends because they’re a nice combination of “quiet, contemplative side-by-side activity” and “let’s get out and do something”!
I once carved out time to take silly pictures with a new conference friend in a funny upside-down room at the conference venue. It amazed me how nice it felt to be fussed over after the stress of my first conference talk. As I started speaking more, I started offering to take pictures of conference attendees and many shared the same sentiment. Many people find conferences overwhelming and it’s nice to take a few minutes and relax, make a new friend, and maybe go home with new headshots.
My education often surprises people because it violates many people’s expectations: I don’t hold a CS degree, and I never attended a Bootcamp. In college, I studied Geology with a combined geochemical and planetary science twist. Since shifting into software, I have heard countless times “Geology!? That must have been such a… change”. Even today, comments like that feel challenging and exclusionary and early in my career shift, it felt terrible. We hear again and again that having folks from diverse backgrounds help teams innovate, but when meeting someone who doesn’t fit our expectations, most of us still do a double-take. If I get that as a white degree-touting former-scientist, imagine the uncomfortable responses folks in groups with more bias encounter when we express our surprise!
It turns out that my winding path toward programming has allowed me to make some of my most useful contributions. We don’t talk about it enough, but many use programming skills even if they haven’t written a line of code. If you’re considering development but are wondering how you will fit in, I encourage you to take a peek at communities like Write the Docs (their Slack), #CodeNewbie (their Twitter), or send me a hello via my Twitter or email.
How has your background in science influenced your programming career?
It wasn’t until I was doing research at JPL that I started to understand what programming was. There was a fair bit of “grit” need: I needed to learn MATLAB the semester before my internship so I found the one professor whose research relied on MATLAB and set up an independent study with him. The licensed computer was in the basement of a building across campus. He allowed me to practice during his office hours, so I hoofed it over there twice a week to learn as much MATLAB as I could. When my summer research mentor was from a code-heavy tech-school and when he saw me stumbling, he commented: “and I thought you went to a good school.”
I didn’t learn to program that summer, but I started acting as a liaison between our team’s developer and the other interns who were testing his program by hand. During those meetings, we busted many of my personal programming myths. For example, up until that time I believed that proficient programmers would write a program, in the same way, I would write a letter to a friend, mostly top to bottom (maybe going back for a misspelling or two). That programs could be made from libraries of existing code and some “glue” blew my mind. I started reading our program and soon was pointing and suggesting changes. I started to compare the modules in our program to the processes we might run in the lab environment I was used to. Working in a programming-adjacent field made programming more accessible, even if I did need to beg my way into someone’s basement lab along the way!
Why did you start using Python?
Two things drew me to the Python community: Python’s proximity to so many fields of science (with so many libraries developed for specific applications) and their welcoming community.
Everyone I spoke to as I was deciding to explore programming underscored the importance of a welcoming community and recommended I start with Python. Python got themselves a new “lifer”. While I found many of the general “programming” communities overwhelming (I may never carve out a place for myself on Stack Overflow), I quickly found my place at Boston Python (they had weekend-long tutorials running and I both attended and TA-ed with them). The email list of the Harvard Astro group, whose research questions sometimes overlapped with my interests, became my place to lurk and see how those who relied on Python used the language to solve their problems. There are lots of different ways to learn!
The interest in Python has only grown and there are a multitude of ways to engage with the community. I encourage you to find the way(s) that make the most sense for your learning and socializing styles. We aren’t all Meetup/conference people!
Online communities/forums: CodeNewbies and dev.to are two of my favorites! They have twitter check-ins, podcasts, blog post. I’m also part of the Recurse Center, lovingly called “the world’s best programming community with a three-month onboarding process” and pop into their chats from time to time.
Meetups: Vary by city, but I have most enjoyed ones that rotate their themes, publicize & support other Meetup communities, and make efforts to document resources. Some have active Slack communities that allow people to communicate easily between meetings!
Conferences: Are wonderful (for me) and each has its own culture. I’ve found the ones intentional about culture-building to give the best experiences for attendees and speakers (if they work to clarify attendees’ needs or explain the PacMan rule, I’m in!)
Informal resources: Having a few folks that you go to for advice is invaluable. Seek out those folks and nurture those relationships.
There are many ways to find support but it takes time to find the spaces you can grow in. Experiment!
Thanks for doing the interview, Veronica!
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