Ginny Hendry

Hi, I’m Mike. I’m here with Ginny Hendry at Windy City Rails and we’re going to talk a little bit about how Ginny is involved with the Rails Bridge Women’s Outreach workshops and also the Chicago Ruby and Chicago JavaScript groups. So Ginny, can you tell me a little bit, let’s start with the Rails Bridge Women’s Outreach. Those were very interesting. Yeah, Rails Bridge started in San Francisco. It was started by the two Sarahs. Sarah May and Sarah Allen went to the San Francisco Ruby users group meeting and looked around and said, why are we the only two women in this room? And they decided that they would do something about it. So they started Rails Bridge, which is training for women in basic Rails to get women started. So there’s a lot of them running in San Francisco. They run quite frequently, but they’re… We’re also starting to run them in other places. So a year and a half ago, we had the first one in Chicago. Desi McAdam started that. She had done them before. And in fact, the Rails Bridge, anybody who’s done it once as a student can easily run, as a student or a teacher, can easily run another one because it’s simple enough to do once you’ve done it once. So we had the first one here. Desi ran it. And then we’ve had two more since that I have run. Two parts. The night before, you have install fest so that everyone can be ready in the morning when the class starts to do programming. They’re going to get everything installed. Some people, they install on their own machine. So some people, it takes a while, depending on the condition of their machine and what’s compatible, all that stuff. But we get that out of the way the night before, and then we have a whole day of programming. And it is introductory. Everyone is invited. Sometimes we get people. Who don’t know what the command line is, for instance. And sometimes we get people who are experienced programmers in other languages, and we take them all and train them, give them a full day of training. And what we find is that some people, they love it, and they keep coming back, and you see them again, and they get jobs in the field and all that. And some people find that they don’t like it. But that is a valuable thing. They’re no longer wishing and hoping they know. Yeah, getting over that hump and saying, oh. I really wish I was a programmer, and then doing it for a day or so, and being like, eh, no. Yeah. Some people are cut out for it, and some people aren’t. But it gives you a good amount of time to try it out and see. And they’re well scripted, too. So it supports just pretty much anybody, any level. You just sub, sub, sub, sub, step. You go through it. That’s one of the best things about it is that the curriculum is already set, and it is open source, so it’s out on GitHub. So if anybody wants to run their own, training program using the curriculum, you can. And the InstallFest curriculum is also up on GitHub. So that makes it really easy to run one of those because the hard part is making a sensible curriculum of the appropriate length and the appropriate level. Well, that’s done. You just have to get the people together to execute it. Yeah. And is this something that people have learned about? I mean, obviously, or I shouldn’t say obviously, but the way I think is that people would learn about the Rails. I should say, how do you find people that might not otherwise have been exposed to Ruby or Rails? How do they find out about these tutorials? I don’t know. There is a Chicago Women’s Developers group here, but that came about after the first Rails bridge. And then I don’t know how the first one was publicized because Desi did it, but it got a pretty good crowd. Right. And now we have a regular mail. We have a regular mailing list and we can send out announcements to anybody on the mailing list. And then we ask everybody to have their friends sign up. But I don’t know what the method was to fill the first one. Yeah, yeah. Because we think that with user groups, you can communicate to other developers and there’s channels that developers tend to follow. But if you’re trying to reach out to somebody who’s maybe not necessarily already in the industry, or they’re not following Twitter and things like that, they might not know. So yeah, that would be interesting to find out how that communication goes. Yeah, we should be doing more of them. And in that case, we should probably do something more formal about finding people. Have you seen anybody come in through the Rails bridge workshops and then end up coming to user group meetings? Yes, there have been several of them who have done that. Some of them, they don’t come back because they live far away. So that’s all right. And some of them, as I said, find they don’t care for it. But yeah, we have seen some come back. And our biggest success is one of the people who came to the first one. Yeah, she was the first Rails bridge who had never done any programming at all. But she’d seen it because she had friends who were in the business. She thought, you know, I want to try that from absolutely zero experience and exposure. And she came to Rails bridge. And she’s done a lot of work since and she now has a job as a programmer. So it’s great. So it works. So I mean, you actually really did change somebody’s life. Yeah. And they went from not being a programmer to Being a programmer. A professional programmer and working in the industry. That’s great. Yeah. Yeah. And okay, so, you know, if I may ask, you know, with, with women in the industry, you know, and it’s obviously something that you want, you, you feel that you put in your own time to help teach other people. Is that something that, you know, in user groups, there is a Chicago women’s user group, Chicago women’s developers groups, and then, you know, the workshops, obviously, and for a little while, there was Chicago rubies, which was actually more of a support group. There was a support network for, I hope I’m not mischaracterizing what the group was, but it was people who were the wives of professional software developers who got together and they were supporting each other the way, this is the way I understand what the group was. You know, is there something that, you know, having, having been a woman going to user groups and stuff like that, you know, is it been overall friendly, something that you obviously enjoy? Yeah, I like going to user group meetings and conferences. That’s, that’s true. Well, it’s, it’s user groups themselves, I’ve found have been perfectly friendly. There are very, very few women who do show up, but I’ve never had any, any difficulties going to them and, or, and I haven’t noticed any other, other people having difficulties going to them or being unwelcome or anything like that. I think it’s really, it’s just a reflection of our field, in our field, in open source development. It, it’s about 3% women. I’ve been looking around and counting, and it’s about 3%, and it’s true, not just in Ruby, it’s true in Python and the other open source areas. It’s true in the US, it’s true in Europe, it’s true in the one place I’ve looked at in South America. It’s true there, too. So, it’s a reflection of our industry, not of our user groups. They are just… Bigger and older companies have more women, and that’s an interesting thing. Why is that? One of the reasons is that bigger and older companies have HR departments who have regulations that they enforce. Yeah, they’re not, there’s not people just hiring their friends, which in very tiny companies, that’s what it is. So, that inevitably builds on itself. If the first people started are a certain kind of person, and they only hire their friends, their friends are probably, you know, Guys as well. Similar. Yeah. Yeah, young fellas. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just like them. So, the tiny, tiny companies that we often have in our business are less likely to have any kind of unusual outsider types brought in, just because they’re so small, and they don’t even have an HR department. Right. And, you know, and I think it might be something that having more people, I mean, because… One thing I’ve observed is finding your network through user groups, and finding employers and making friends through user groups, that, you know, encouraging more women maybe to come to user group meetings and come out to conferences helps them to start to have those women make those friendships where they get brought in. Yeah, but it’s hard to get the ball rolling whenever you’re talking about numbers that are so small. Right. And it takes a while. I know I went to Ruby users group. For a long time before I felt like I knew anybody, you know, it’d be like being in a room full of strangers for a while. Right. I didn’t know anything about Ruby when I started. I’d been programming for years, but not in Ruby. I didn’t know anything about Ruby or anything about the people in the users group. I just showed up every month, and it took a while to settle in. And now, I know everybody and everybody knows me, but that is a long time later. Yeah. That is years later. So, it’s not like… Everybody’s your best buddy, and you get six job offers. No, that doesn’t happen. Yeah. You have to build the reputation. And get to know people, to actually know them beyond just saying, hi, how do you like the pizza? Yeah. It can be difficult, particularly for the typical nerdy introvert programmer personality. Yeah. But that is one reason why we have hack nights here. Chicago Ruby started out, it had, it was a suburban group and a city group combined, so then it had two meetings a month, one in the suburbs and one in the city. And I said to Ray, who runs the group, you know, we should have a hack night, too. And Ray’s an excellent delegator, and he said, okay, you run it then. Yeah. So, since then, we’ve also had a monthly hack night. We should do… Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, it’s good delegating. Yeah. So, the advantage of hack night… Hack night, besides you get practice, of course, that is extremely valuable for people, is to practice their coding, and to practice their pair coding, if they don’t have a chance to do that at work, it’s also a chance to really meet people in not a strictly social atmosphere. You know, the time before the presentation at a regular meeting is strictly a social kind of thing. But if you are sitting paired up at hack night for an hour and a half programming with somebody, then you get to know them. And so, that’s another advantage of having hack nights. Yeah. And this is just one thing, this is a, you know, it’s strictly a gender question, because obviously, as a guy, I don’t know what it’s like for, you know, I remember what it was like for me as a newbie coming into Ruby and sitting down and being completely intimidated sitting down with established developers. Oh, yeah, yeah. You feel like, oh, God, they’re going to laugh at me because I’m such a dope. I don’t know anything. Yeah, I was a .NET developer who went to a hack. I was a hack night for RSpec, and Dave Jalemski is running the technique of that, and I barely knew Ruby at the time, much less Vim or any of that. So, it was extremely intimidating for me, but, again, I was also in a room full of guys, and, you know, I don’t know if that made a difference. Like, is it something that, you know, in your experience working with the women in the Rails bridge and also, you know, coincidentally being a woman yourself, you know, is that something that maybe is off-putting? I don’t know. Because for me, it’s not, but that’s because I grew up with three brothers and no sisters, and I went to a college that it was the second year that had women in it, so there were hardly any women there, and I majored in science at that college, so there were hardly any women there, so I spent my formative years being one of the very, very few women or girls in a group, in a large group of people, so to me, it feels fairly normal. If I walk into a room full of people and it’s all men with name tags and MacBooks, you know, I feel right at home, so I’m used to it, but it might be quite different for other people. I don’t actually know. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Janine, for what you’re doing and also for taking the time to speak with me. All right. Thanks, Mike.