MEET Terian and Hailee

While organizing our fourth Django Girls PDX workshop, we were a little low on applicants and were looking for channels to reach out on. We both had attended PDXWIT events in the past and thought that the Women in Tech happy hour would be a great avenue for potential applicants. We reached out to PDXWIT and Megan (Co-founder & President) offered us some speaking time in front of the group.

We gave a quick two-minute speech during the announcements and then spent the rest of the night speaking to women who were interested in the workshop. This was huge because we saw a flood of applicants come in after the happy hour.

Unfortunately, just a few days before the event we had a lot of unexpected cancellations. We decided to reach out to the PDXWIT community through their Slack and Facebook group. We had an awesome response and were able to fill the remaining spots even though the event was the next day! Because of the cost and effort that goes into putting on a workshop, it’s ideal for us to be at full capacity. That wouldn’t have been possible without PDXWIT.

In addition, Amanda (PDXWIT Board Vice President) gave a lightning talk at the workshop about PDXWIT. This was awesome because many of our attendees are looking to enter the tech industry and PDXWIT is a great resource for them to know about.

Django Girls is an international non-profit that helps enable volunteers all over the work to organize free one-day programming workshops for women. The workshop aims to provide a safe space for women to get their first introduction to web development in Python and Django. We work to remove obstacles and help enable women to explore programming in addition to giving them tools and resources to continue learning on their own after the workshop. 

We’re super grateful for PDXWIT!