During FUDCon, I heard that later in the year we might get a
Django Girls workshop in Pune. If you never heard about Django Girls before,
here is a quote from the website:
"Django Girls is a non-profit organization that empowers and helps women to
organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and
support. It was born in July 2014 in Berlin and started by two Polish girls:
Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka."
I also found that we are going host it in the Red Hat Pune office. As soon as the
call for mentors came out, I applied, and got chosen to become a mentor for the
workshop.

Last Saturday was the actual workshop day. Going to office only after four
hours of sleep was difficult, but I somehow managed to do so with enough amount
of coffee :). I met Shagufta (the organizer) of the workshop there, later
Priyanka also reached the venue. There were in total five mentors, and around
twenty-seven participants. We started a bit late as we had to wait for a few
participants.

In my group I had five students, one just finished college this year, two
were in their final years, and one second year student. The last student was from
third year mechanical department. Python was a new language for them, and two students
used Windows. <sarcasm>As my knowledge about Windows is way better</sarcasm>, we installed Fedora
on Virtualbox in those two computers. The tutorial for the
workshop is available on Github. At
the beginning of the session, I told that our biggest problem will be typing
mistakes (as it is in any workshop). We learned few basic commands, Python
language syntax, and then moved into Django.
We also used the excellent
https://www.pythonanywhere.com to deploy our
code. We went with a slow pace as we have to keep debugging our typing mistakes
:) Even though we did not finish the whole tutorial, I showed them how to use
IRC, and get help there. I also suggested that we can do a few more sessions if
they want, they just have to come with a date when all of them can come down
once again. Oh here is a tip, if your students want to copy-paste code from the
book, ask them to do so from the markdown source files, or from rendered HTML
files in github.
The workshop ended with a group photoshoot. There will be another workshop in
Mumbai in the coming months.