Sarah Allen and Desi McAdam

What is, what is it, what is it, what the current, because 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 dueling. It can be a wall. The particular technology. Or your 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. Yeah, that's, yeah, that one's... But, but for the Rails workshop, that is really an important step. And then 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 experience. Maybe they already hit Java but they never did Rails.

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 line. 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's 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, 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, 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 the 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.

Well, so I've done them, 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, you know, 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 pool 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 the 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.

And you wanted to create something that would help bring... Yeah, so the stats are there. We were at a conference where there were 200 people and six women. So that's 3%, which is reflective of...

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. 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.

Therefore, if there's 20% of programmers are women, overall, statistically...

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 no Ruby, then it would be easy to actually get 50%. 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. And I also heard that in the startups, it's also a boys club culture as well. And with 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. They get together and they start the startup, and then they hire people like them from their own network. Is that something that you've seen in the startup world where it tends to be male-dominated companies just... 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 networks, and men see those kinds of opportunities as available to them for whatever reason. But I do think that the social dynamics of creating situations where women and men and people of all colors and creeds can get together and learn together, then we force those networks where, by example, people see that what you happen to look like, the words you use, your background, doesn't dictate that you are more or less capable of doing these technical things. And when somebody walks into a RailsBridge workshop, they can't tell by looking at somebody whether they're an expert programmer or very successful in their career or unemployed, and all of these things are not correlated with each other and they're not correlated with how to look. And so that's really exciting to me that I hope it will bring that change broadly, but in any case, we are seeing it as absolutely making those changes in pockets. And I think that we need to overcome this problem one person at a time, one mentor at a time. Climate seats all over so that way eventually these communities can... Well, I think that we're talking about changing the ratio is a boil-in-the-ocean kind of problem. However, since we've proven that this template can be fairly easily reproduced by anyone, I like to think that we can boil the ocean by making every tenth molecule a heater. Okay, so basically planting the seeds so that way it can at least distribute these ideas beyond a small community and basically... Yeah, and we're seeing this happen in Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Scala... Oh yeah, so are all of these RailsBridge... well, RailsBridge is, by definition, Rails-oriented, but have you done these for... Well, RailsBridge was created... the name Rails was a little controversial when we were naming it, but we felt that it was coming out of Rails developers, but the Teaching Kids project has always taught... has never taught Rails. Right, yes. However, the Python folks felt like it would alienate their community to call it RailsBridge, so they called it PyStar, because there was already a PyBridge something. But now we're creating an umbrella organization that will be able to support all of these different things. Okay, so that way you don't have to bias that, "Well, I don't want to do that, I don't like Rails. " Yeah. It's... do you have a... well, I won't make you say the name now, because I'm sure it might change, but it's recognizing the fact that we're software developers, not Rails. Yeah, and I think most of us are doing Rails right now.

And five years from now, we'll be doing something else. Yeah, right now being the operative word there, it's... it might change. Everything changes. And, uh, um, with... with going into a conference, and have you...

I mean, SCNA, I think, is an excellent conference. I have. I've noticed a big difference, actually. Yeah, and I think that part of it is that the women in the... some women in the community who weren't coming out to events because they felt alienated have started to come out more. And then the, um, new people in the community have connections to people already in the community. The other thing that has happened in parallel is a lot of the event organizers have realized that they need to take, um, initiative to change how they ask for speakers to create a diversity amongst speakers. And if we have more women speakers, then it's less alienating to, um, have... for women to come to the event. They... they feel like there are role models and mentors for them. And it's easier to look at a group of 20 people. And if you see yourself represented, then you feel like, "Hey, that could be me. " Recently, I learned about a picture that was, uh, uh, very popular in the Obama administration. Uh, when Obama first took office, he was meeting with some... some people, and there were some children there. I'm not exactly sure the context why they were there. But one of the little boys, he was black, and he just said very partly, he said... He asked this question, and they couldn't hear what he said, and they asked him to speak up. And he said, "I want to... I just want to know if your hair feels like mine. " And... and they're... the... the photographer got this amazing picture that was very candid. And it was the president leaning down, and this little boy touching his head. And... what was so inspiring about that is that it was... Here's this generation now seeing somebody like them in... in a position of... of authority and responsibility. And... and are... are you saying that seeing women speaking and running these conferences, running these organizations, says to the women, "There's people like you doing this. " Yeah, I think that there is this myth in our industry that there are no women.

That somehow women are less interested or less capable because, as evidenced by there being so few. And I've talked to women who've been the only woman in their company, and then they start to say, "Well, that's just the way the industry is. " Especially if you've been through two jobs like that. But the truth is, numbers-wise, there's tons of amazing technical women in our field. And the fact that historically we haven't seen them at conferences is a cultural artifact that is not related to their lack of existence. And so, by creating diversity, and I think we don't have an... we don't only have a gender diversity problem. No. Diversity along many angles problem. But I think that the more that we create, we find these people. These people who are doing technically amazing work. And they've been in the industry for 5, 10, 20 years. And we celebrate their success. The more that we draw in people, and nobody should say, "Oh, I can't see anybody who looks like me. I don't belong here. " Right. I mean, the dream of technology is that it's a meritocracy, that it's a great equalizer. And it's just a terrible thing that's not actually happening.

And so that's what we're really trying to change. Anybody who says that women can't code never read about Grace Hopper. To me, it's utterly ridiculous. But I do want to thank you again for sitting down with me, and the work you're doing with the Browns Bridge Outreach. outreach. Thanks.