Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

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.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - "an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology." I only just found out about it, so unfortunately I don't have an article prepared, but I wanted to help by raising a little awareness and inviting you to go read some of the articles that have been published today in honor of women in technology. Here are a few to get started:

• Ada Lovelace Day - Finding Ada by Desi McAdam
• Ada Lovelace Day heroine: Valerie Aurora by Mackenzie Morgan
• Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day by Audrey Eschright
• Ada Lovelace Day - Grace Hopper by Brenda Wallace
• Ada Lovelace Day by Liz Henry
• Ada Lovelace Day: Tribute to Suw Charman-Anderson by Kevin Anderson (Husband of Suw Charman-Anderson, creator of Ada Lovelace Day)

There are several more links to articles on the pledge website. Even if you don't sign the pledge or write a post, today I encourage you to think about all the tech women you know & celebrate them. :)

I realized that I haven't written yet about some of the events I've been to in Wellington, so I thought I'd give y'all an idea of what I've been doing for the past 3 months. I've been trying to infiltrate the nerd community here and meet as many people as I can, so here's a few of the events I've attended and what I thought of them.

WellRailed (November)

WellRailed is the Ruby on Rails group in Wellington. I've been subscribed to the mailing list for a while now, and it was cool to meet some of the people that I see writing on the list all the time. I liked the style of the meeting and I thought it was productive. It started with drinks, pizza, and socializing, and then moved into two short talks by Paul Flewelling (i18n in Rails 2) and Will Bryant (submitting a patch to Rails on github). I'm looking forward to attending more of these meetings before I leave NZ.

Tweet-Up (November)

This one is pretty self-explanatory. I thought this was a great event for meeting people, and following new people on twitter helps me keep up with what's going on in Wellington.

Women in Technology (December)

I happened to stumble across the Women in Technology website one day and was quite intrigued. I emailed and asked if I could attend one of their meetings just to see what it was about. When I got there, I quickly realized that their idea of 'technology' was not quite the same as mine - i.e. it was not a room full of programmers, but women who use any type of technology in the workplace. I did, however, really enjoy the presentation. A woman from Auckland talked to us about how to properly give a presentation. It's really amazing to learn from someone while they demonstrate just how much they know about their subject. She was an excellent presenter.

Girl Geeks (December)

Last year Erica and I attended a Girl Geek Dinner Event in San Francisco, so when I saw that Wellington had a Girl Geek Community I was pretty excited. I went to their Girl Geek Drinks event and there was a great turnout! It was so nice to meet a bunch of girl geeks in Wellington. I hope to be able to attend more of these events while I'm here.

Webstock (February)

Next month I'll be attending Webstock! I am really looking forward it, and will surely post here about my Webstock experience. Hope to see you there!

P.S. In other news, Dan and I had a lovely holiday traveling around NZ's South Island. You can check out the photos on my flickr.

Last Thursday, Erica and I headed out to San Francisco to attend the first annual Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner. We ended up having a really great weekend meeting people and listening to panelists at the dinner, as well as visiting with the team at Pivotal Labs the following day.

According to the Women 2.0 post (who sponsored the Girl Geek Dinner) over 600 people showed up at Google's Mountain View campus to network and listen to the panelists (Yes, Google really does have heated toilet seats!). I think its wonderful that so many attended, Phoenix would surely have a much smaller turnout. The topic of the evening was "building credibility and reputation in technology and business." While I really enjoyed listening to the panelists, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. I thought there would be more specific advice about how to promote yourself as a woman in the tech world, and I found most of the advice pretty general (i.e. Believe in yourself, don't let people tell you you don't belong in tech, don't be afraid to disagree, etc.). Aside from that, I found the event truly inspirational. All four women on the panel -- Leah Culver (Co-Founder and Lead Developer, Pownce), Sumaya Kazi (Entrepreneur and Social Media Manager, Sun Microsystems), Irene Au (Director of User Experience, Google), and Rashmi Sinha (CEO, SlideShare) -- have done very well for themselves, and it was great to hear them talk about the steps they've taken to get where they are. Some of the things I took away were the following:

• Contribute to open source projects. (Leah Culver)
• Write articles that show your personality.(Sumaya Kazi)
• Don't forget to network. (Irene Au)
• You have to have a thick skin. Decide what parts of yourself you want to put out there, try not to post personal things. (Rashmi Sinha)

In addition to the panel, the Girl Geek Event was really about networking. Erica and I had the chance privilege of meeting Arena Reed, a designer at Pivotal Labs. Integrum and Pivotal are both agile shops, so it was interesting to chat with Arena about process - something we've been talking about a lot lately at Integrum. Arena was nice enough to invite us to the Pivotal office Friday morning to see how they operate and talk with some of the other employees. It was very reassuring to see a shop working so well with agile, and I'm optimistic that Integrum will find what works best for us soon enough. Thanks everyone at Pivotal for being so welcoming!

It turned out to be a great couple of days in San Francisco, thanks again to Angie Chang of Women 2.0 and Pivotal Labs for making it an enjoyable and productive trip!

Just an FYI, the Integrum girls (myself and Erica) will be attending the first Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner on January 31. I think it will be a great opportunity to meet people and hear some interesting speakers. (I'm also pretty excited to see the Google Campus in Mountain View!) Unfortunately, registration is already closed, but if you're attending find us and say hello! When we get back I'll be sure to post my thoughts/notes on the event. Hope to see you there!