Parallels Between Career Building and Home Remodeling a talk by Jackie Kazil

Saturday, 15 June, 10:15 in Ballroom and streamed live to Club

Ten years ago, I had a five year plan. A plan to fix an eighty‑year‑old house in Washington, DC. That five year plan turned into the ten year plan.

During those ten years, I went from working as a data journalist at The Washington Post, to working as a software engineer for the Library of Congress, to being a Presidential Innovations Fellow for The White House under the appointment of President Obama. I wrote a book for O’Reilly Media, I am “completing” a Ph.D, I created the leading library in my field in Python, and I started a family, giving birth to the keynote speaker for PyCon CZ 2042.

In the past, if you had asked me how I did all of these things, I wouldn’t have had a sufficient answer. It wasn’t until I was able to reflect back upon the remodeling of that house, that I truly began to understand my accomplishments. In this talk, I’ll impart the lessons that I learned in that house remodeling, and the interesting way in which they apply to software development and my career.

This talk is suitable for both beginner and advanced Pythonistas.

Jackie Kazil

I’m a Czech-American engineer and former White House Presidential Innovation Fellow. I’ve worked for various major companies and government agencies like The Washington Post and The Library of Congress.

I’m a leader in PyLadies and sit on the Board of Directors for the Python Software Foundation. I'm the creator of Mesa, an agent-based modeling library in Python and working on my Ph.D in Computational Social Science.

I remodel house(s) in my spare time, living in Washington, DC with my husband, daughter, and dog.

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