Sarah Allen & Desi McAdam

Hi, I’m Mike with UBITASIC here again at SCNA. I’m sitting down with Sarah Allen and Desi McAdam. They created the RailsBridge Workshop, which is, well, I’ll let you describe what exactly is the RailsBridge Workshop. So, RailsBridge is a broad organization that was started by a number of Rails developers who really wanted to create the kind of community that they wanted to be a part of. Sarah Mae and myself started what’s, as a RailsBridge project, it’s the RailsBridge Open Workshops. And specifically in San Francisco, we used the Open Workshop formula to create outreach workshops to women. And the idea is we’re using open source practices to apply to event organization and outreach projects. So. So, the, what we call recipes or cookbook for creating the event, as well as the curricula, are all open source and freely available for anybody to use for anything. And then Desi has happened to be traveling all over the world and has created instances of these workshops wherever she’s been, as well as dozens or many, many other volunteers have done that all over the country and the world. What’s the format? What is it? Well, the current, as you said, it’s an open source thing, so I’m sure there’s some evolution. What is the current format of a? So, the core format is a Friday night, Saturday event, where on Friday, all of the installation occurs. So, you have volunteers who come and help people get their machines set up. Because that is often the most difficult part for beginners, and it really has nothing to do with the, you know, writing code or doing. It can be a wall. The particular technique. Or get Ruby on my computer. Boom. Yeah, I mean, particularly Rails is so many collections of open source packages, and it’s particularly hard on, you know, and it’s different for each machine you’re on. Once you’ve got Ruby and Rails installed, it’s easy. And then it’s different for the different technologies, and in fact, there’s now a front-end workshop that doesn’t have an evening install fest, because everybody has a browser and a text editor, and that’s kind of easy. Yeah, that one’s. But for the Rails workshop, that is really an important step. And then. Yeah. Saturday is, everybody follows the same curricula, and you have at least two groups. One is for people who’ve never written code before, and the other is for, you know, whatever degree of. Maybe they already hit Java, but they never did Rails. Exactly. So, sometimes we’ll find that people who are sysadmins are faster learning Rails than experienced programmers who maybe have done desktop applications, but aren’t very familiar with the command. So, your level of experience as a coder doesn’t necessarily correlate to how fast you’ll learn the very first steps of Rails. So, you might have predisposed towards, “Oh, this is how we do it on the desktop.” Whereas somebody who has maybe had some scripting experience doesn’t have maybe as rigorous a mindset on, “Oh, yeah, it has to be this way.” Yeah, because you’ll have different learning curves for people who’ve done web apps, so they understand HTTP, versus people who’ve done C++, therefore, they understand, object-oriented programming, versus people who’ve done a lot of command-line stuff, and so they’re very facile with the scripting aspects of it. So, we try to group people into like-minded experience, but mostly it’s depending on the size of the workshop, the grouping is flexible, depending on the venue, and the size, and the number of volunteers and teachers you have, and sometimes it’s just everybody’s in a room, and we figure it out. Yeah. And, Jessie, you wanted to say something? Yeah, I was just going to say, in addition to that, so, like, typically, I try to, I try to group people based on very broad generalizations, so I’ve programmed before, I’ve never programmed before, or I’ve done some Rails, but I need some more help with, you know, more advanced concepts, and then split the people apart and try to get TAs that match, sort of, those, like, comfort levels of teaching. And you said you’ve gone all over the world and done these all over, I’m just curious, like, all, I mean, literally, like, where, When you say world, what do you mean? Well, so I’ve done one. I’ve done quite a few in the United States, and I’ve done one in Singapore, and I’ve helped out with one in Chile, and I can’t remember every world. But it’s really easy to, once you’ve seen one run and you have a desire to do them, it’s really not very difficult. If you ping the mailing list, everybody will tell you what the latest, you know, we just ran one last weekend, and this is what we ran into. We’ve already done pull requests to update the documentation, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So everybody’s super helpful. And there’s some really nice side effects that come from that. A lot of people who don’t really know anything about the workshops go to our instructions for how to install Rails because, you know, a new version of this or that comes out, and the install instructions change. But because now there are workshops happening several times a month in lots of different places, those are updated by the volunteers, and there are different volunteers every time, so it isn’t as much of a burden. So it’s also kind of becoming a documentation unto itself, not just a script for how to do these classes, but also, hey, I just need to set up Rails. Yes. Yeah, there’s a lot of different things that come out of it, and, you know, educational resources and set-up resources and different things. So that’s a pretty neat side effect of your community. And I do want to ask about the social aspect. The way I understand is that the legend is that, Sarah Ellen and Sarah May were at a conference, and they didn’t see a lot of other women. Did you realize that you were the only two women and hundreds of people, and you wanted to create something that would help bring… Yeah, so the stats are we were at a conference where there were 200 people and six women. So that’s 3%, which is reflective of… Or is it 2%? Well, in any case, it’s around the number of women in open source, which is much, much smaller than the number of women in the corporate world doing programming. And I came more from companies which were less involved with open source, where I felt that there were not very many women, but there were more women than I saw in the Ruby community. And I’d been meaning to learn Ruby for three years before I had started learning Ruby in 2008. Right. And so I thought, and I still believe it’s true that there are more women programmers in the Bay Area than there are Ruby programmers. Really? Therefore, if there’s 20% of programmers are women, overall, statistically… Why aren’t 20% of them Ruby developers? No, it’s actually more… We have a bigger opportunity than that. Oh, okay. Because Ruby is a small language. So therefore, if we just convert some of the existing programmers to know Ruby, Right. then it would be easy to actually get 50%. But it does… And in any of the new languages, I think we have a real big opportunity to do that. Because in any specific community, we can change the ratio much easier because it’s smaller than just, you know, the boiling the ocean problem. I also heard that in the startups, it’s also a boys club culture as well. And Ginny, I did an interview with Ginny a few months ago, and she described it as, when a startup happens, it’s usually some friends that get together and they start the startup and then they hire people like that. From their own network. Is that something that you’ve seen in the startup world where it tends to be male dominated companies? Well, statistically, tech founders are 2% to 3% women. And I think that a lot of that, there is a culture in the United States that is where men have the debt networks and men see those girls, and they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this.” And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. And I think that’s a big part of it. 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