print(“Hello World!”)

Posted on by Marie and Ines

Categories: blog and student posts

“Machine learning for the curious but scared!!” – that was the name of the Meetup where we (Ines and Marie) almost met each other. Indeed, we didn’t notice each other until nine days later when Marie posted this comment:

Team nk42

PyLadies meetup page



Ines read it, googled “Rails Girls Summer of Code”, read it again and went to bed. A crazy idea to spend a whole summer with coding! She has a job and and … Ines really wants to speed up her coding skills. So she decided at the next day it might be a good idea to meet Marie.

Six months later we are sitting together at the Hackdays at ImmobilienScout Berlin and writing this blogpost.

So, Ines: who is Marie?

Team nk42

Photo by Natasha Linde, @photolinde



I could give you some data points about her (from Czech Republic, lives in Neukölln, studied German language and literature, …) but that doesn’t really say much about Marie. So let me tell you something else – and there are two obvious facts to talk about:

  1. You can’t just visit Marie. You always visit Marie AND her Husky. Pushki. He will check you first (I am very happy that he accepted me) and spend the rest of the time running circles around you, begging for food, poking Marie’s knees and start again from the beginning. So if you ever struggle to distract yourself from work: Pushki will help you!

  2. Marie loves Python. She can tell you about 42 reasons why Python is the best programming language ever(!) and why you should immediately start to learn it. She started learning Python about 1.5 years ago and never doubted if it was a good idea – even though it was not always easy. Some errors literally rubbed her sleep.

And Marie: who is Ines?

Team nk42

Photo by KAthrin Gütt



  • Ines is a Marketing expert, studied Museology and Art History and also lives in Neukölln (that’s why our name starts with NK).
  • Ines does not like text written in points (see this text!), she likes paragraphs.
  • She has deep knowledge of art dealing with mass surveillance. When Ines tells you the story of a surveillance photo, it makes a very scary impression! She could even write a book about it!
  • Ines connects elements together in a very original way that others can understand at the end of the day purely by accident. No idea how it is possible, but it works! Isn’t that impressive?! :p
  • Ines is very friendly to people, likes to be Marie’s teammate. :)
  • Ines likes to play beach volleyball and goes everywhere by bike in Berlin.

These are the great people making our project possible:

Our coaching company became SoundCloud. Our mentor for the project Foodsaving is Tilmann Becker. He is an expert in Web Development, Requirement Engineering and Software Architecture.

We have 6 coaches in our team:

Ellen König is a Data Scientist, works on A/B testing tools and machine learning, mainly works with Python and Django, and is our main contact for data understanding.

Dave Brotherstone is a Software Engineer, works with JavaScript, worked on Open Source Python projects, is one of our main contact coaches.

Duana Stanley is a Software Engineer, coach at Rails Girls, helps us with the organisation at the coaching company.

Daniel Temme is a Software Engineer, expert for test driven development and agile methodologies.

Stefan Nordhausen is a System Developer, works with Python and regularly teaches Python.

Ana Krivokapić is Software Engineer, works with Python, was a coach at DjangoGirls.

About Food

Enormous amount of food is wasted every day – in stores and restaurants, at home etc. and I think we don’t need to explain to you why this is a massive problem. That’s why a small but dedicated group of people started the Foodsaving & Foodsharing project in Germany, Austria, Switzerland in 2013. The website Foosharing was created for the purpose of surplus food exchange. Since then, the community has grown and people from non-German speaking countries started to be interested. So the organizers decided to build a multilingual platform called Foodsaving.

We would like to support this great project during our Summer of Code. Foodsharing & Foodsaving is a great project to learn all relevant basics we need to build a solid web application. The web application is using Python and Django in the backend and JavaScript (AngularJS) in the frontend. We learn about backend web development with Django REST Framework, API, PostgreSQL and virtual environment.

NK42 Plans @RGSoC’17

  • Improve our ability to understand and write code
  • Better orientate in technical documentation and find the solutions for implementation
  • Contribute to the foodsaving.world and support this great project

After RGSoC

@marie will be a great python/django programmer and will solve tons of issues.

@ines will understand all the data stuff and will never again spend a day figuring out how to install node with a version manager.