Where It All Began

Yep, that was me in that picture, sitting in a seminar room in Florence, Italy, surrounded by fellow attendees at DjangoCon Europe 2017 - long before “vibe coding” was even a thing. My laptop screen glowed with lines of Python code I barely understood. I was debugging my very first Django app with the help of a new friend I’d just met at the conference. He leaned over, offered a few pointers, and before I knew it, the app was running. That small victory felt monumental. But that moment wasn’t just about fixing code - it was symbolic. It was proof that I could belong here, that I could start over.