Jessica Upani: Nomination for 2018 Steering Committee

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

2018 Election : Jessica Upani

Who am I?

My name is Jessica Upani. I am Namibian and I am a high school teacher. I am also a 4th year Mathematics and Computer Science undergraduate student at the University of Namibia. I am an executive of the Python Namibia society. We run Python workshops, meetups and Conferences all over the country.

Previous involvement.

My involvement with the carpentries started in April 2016 when I was one the instructors that were trained by Aleksandra Pawlik in Potchefstroom, South Africa. I then continued with my training and became a certified Software Carpentry instructor on 7th July 2016. My final checkout was done by Greg Wilson. He gave me my qualification. I did not do this alone. I was mentored by David Perez-Suarez. Since then, I hosted and taught two workshops locally. We paired our first workshop with Bertie Seyffert from South Africa. I also had a chance to meet the new instructors that were trained in Cape Town, May 2017.

I am currently training to be an instructor of instructors and I will be maintaining the Python lesson in 2018. Very exciting!

What can I offer?

I am a teacher, in every sense of the word. I enjoy doing it and the Carpentries gives me one more opportunity to give back to my community. Our community in Namibia is small and the Carpentries give me an opportunity to see a change for the better in that regard. I enjoy making life for others better and I enjoy sharing what I know with others. Through the Carpentries, I get to do just that. I have helped several scientists conduct their research with ease, and I intend to help many more.

The way forward.

The have noticed a lot of growth in the Carpentries over the past two years (especially in Africa) and it is all very exciting. And now with the merge, I think that that is a great move and I would like to help get work done. I would like to help reach out to more communities both locally and remotely.

One of the strongest points of the Carpentries is bringing together people from all disciplines. I have never seen any other platform that does such a thing. Which is more of the reason why I want to be more involved in this community.