Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

It's official, I'll be attending RailsConf this year in Baltimore! I didn't get to go last year since I was out of the country, so I'm looking forward to getting back in touch this year. (And being a student certainly pays off... the student discount was a very pleasant surprise!) I also plan on checking out the Ignite RailsConf event which looks like an interesting addition to the program this year. Hope to see you there! :)

Recently we had a guest speaker come in to my marketing class to talk about qualitative research interviews. She had some great advice for interviewing customers and getting valuable information out of them. Here are some tips I learned for conducting customer interviews:

I used to think that these techniques could only be used for market research at large companies who are developing new physical products, but after this particular class I started to think about how qualitative research applies to software development. Every one of these tips should be applied to our relationships with customers - especially in our initial meetings.

As developers, we often get ahead of ourselves and start planning out a product before we fully understand what our customers want. In my opinion, the first meeting with a customer should be exactly like a qualitative research interview. Allow the customer to talk at length about what they need and what kinds of problems they are trying to solve with the software. Show them you care about what they have to say and hold off on offering up your personal opinions. By structuring our initial meetings this way, we can get a clear, unbiased picture of the situation and create better solutions for our customers.

This past weekend I volunteered to be a Teacher's Assistant at the Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women at Harvard University in Boston. I have to say that I was really impressed by the whole event. Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei started doing these workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I'm really glad that Sarah Allen made her way to Boston so we could have one too. There was a great turnout; a mixture of women of all skill levels and ages, and yes, there were some men there too. It was really refreshing to be in a room full of so many kinds of women programming Ruby on Rails.

In her intro, Sarah described her hope to one day attend a meetup where she did not "personally double the number of women" in the room. I certainly know what that's like, and I'm so happy I made the choice to donate a Saturday to this event. This workshop felt so different than any Ruby or Rails event I've attended. There was no judgement, no attitude, no "are you really a rails developer?" - there was just a bunch of people who wanted to learn and some other people who wanted to help.

Thanks so much to Liana Leahy and Mary Tolbert for organizing this event, and to Sarah Allen and Andy Gregorowicz for presenting to the group.

You can read more about the workshop in some post-workshop blog posts from Liana, Sarah, and Andy.

So I've been in grad school for about a month now, and it's going really well so far. It's a ton of work, but my classes are super interesting so I can't really complain too much. :) I decided that I should start a new series of articles on this site, henceforth to be known as "Things I Learned in Grad School." As you probably can gather from my oh-so-creative title, I plan on doing a series of short posts with some random but useful things I learn while I'm at school. So let's hit the ground running with a couple of little tidbits I learned in my Intellectual Property class!

NDA's & Trade Secrets

Did you know that it's not always necessary to make your employees or partners sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)? Or if you're the employee, did you know that if you haven't signed an NDA you are still obligated to keep your employer's trade secrets private? Though an NDA is the easiest way to prove in court that ideas were supposed to be kept private, it's not the only way to win a case of stolen secrets. Your ideas and trade secrets are automatically protected by trade secret law as long as you make a reasonable effort to keep them secret. There are also some relationships (such as employer/employee) where the law assumes confidentiality. So if you haven't signed an NDA, don't assume you can shout other people's secrets from the rooftops, and make sure you know your rights if someone's shouting yours.

P.S. This information is based on United States laws. I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but if you know please enlighten me in the comments. Cheers!