Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[GitHub Presents Passion Projects-Rachel Myers]
♪ [music playing] ♪
Welcome to Passion Projects.
This is our first talk at GitHub.
I want to thank you guys all
for being part of it.
And I also want to thank
our first speaker
Rachel Myers
who is amazing.
She's going to come up here
and rock your faces off
for lack of a better term.
I actually think this is
the most women who have ever been ot GitHub at one time.
[cheers from audience]
This is a really big deal for us.
[laughs] I don't know.
Anyway, so thank you guys all
for showing up,
and if anyone you know that's not here,
wants to catch it live,
it's just...
www.PassionProjects.GitHub.com/live.
There's a GitHub tweet that went out
about it too.
So, thank you guys again
and I'm just going to give
the stage to Rachel Myers.
[audience clapping and cheering]
[Rachel Myers] Thank you.
So I want to start by thanking GitHub
and thanking Julia especially.
So there's a lot of work that went on.
My co-workers are in the back drilling me.
[everyone laughs]
Okay. [laughs]
[laughs] So, I'm really excited about this series,
and I'm really excited to be included.
Thank you.
So tonight, let me start with a quick bio.
My name is Rachel Myers
And if you want to talk,
or argue with me after this,
you can.
I exist on the Internet.
I spend a lot of time drawing
on my Ipad
and I do other things too.
My day-to-day work is
ruby...whoa...
[ruby, rails, javascript, backbone]
[audience laughing]
Yeah...okay...okay.
[audience member] Sorry
I forgive you.
Okay, so my day-to-day work
is in ruby, rails, javascript, and backbone.
I also really love knowing
the whole stack, though,
so I bug our Ops Team a lot
with annoying questions.
And recently, thanks to
women who code, I started learning
to make silly little iOS apps.
I've worked at ModCloth for two years,
So it's kind of hard for me to summarize
my favorite projects.
Broadly, the things I've been most excited
to work on have been security.
[security, SOA, mobile web]
We have a giant monorail app
so breaking that into
service-oriented architecture
has been great.
And then I got to work a lot
with mobile web experiences,
so that has been wonderful.
So tonight, I'm not going
to talk about any of that.
I'm going talk about
what I do outside of work.
My passion is for
expanding the franchise
of people who program,
making it easier for people to learn to program.
I spend my mornings,
my evenings,
sometimes a large chunk of my weekend
doing this.
[Rachel Myers] Because I think it's really important.
I think it improves our world.
I think it improves programming,
and I want to be part of that.
There are a lot of awesome
organizations that are working
to make this possible,
but I volunteer with Railsbridge.
So that's who I am
and that's what I'm going to talk about.
So tonight I'm going to break my talk
into three main parts.
[audience laughs]
Thank you.
How I my found my way...
You guys!
[audience laughing]
[Rachel myers laughs]
First thing I'm going to talk about
how I found my way into programming
with the help of RailsBridge [kon'nichi wa, ruby]
I think that RailsBridge fills
a different nook
than a lot of other ways that people
come to programming.
I'm going to talk about
the organization as it evolves [evolving like a starfish]
and how the volunteers are evolving as well.
And i'm going to talk about why [railsbridge > cobol]
I think this approach
is the best way to spread
a love of programming.
So I learned to program
because someone pointed me
to Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. [Kon'nichi wa, Ruby!]
I don't know if anyone knows about...
I don't know if everyone,
I know that some people know about Why.
Why the lucky stuff?
I really loved the inane details
of Ruby.
Lots of his projects were
about sparking that same love in people.
So in my case, I read the text
and worked the examples that he gave.
And if you asked me a question about
Ruby that he had specifically
like parroted to me,
I would parrot it back.
[Kon'nichi wa. Ruby]
What I didn't have was
a larger context from what he was telling me.
So, I'm about to change the slide.
This is just a warning.
[audience laughing]
Okay...so...
So... [laughs hysterically] Okay, so.
So, what I lacked was a larger
sense of what I knew and I didn't know,
because there's no book
that really tells you,
"Here's what I've told you..."
"...and here's all the other stuff..."
"...that you'll need to do your job," right?
So, I in fact thought that he was joking.
One of the first things
that Why has you do
is make a star monkey.
I have a slide of a star monkey.
At some point you'll get to see it.
There it is! Okay.
[audience laughing]
And so, I thought he was joking.
I thought programming was for serious
and clearly star monkeys
are not for serious.
- [Male] Next slide? - [Rachel] Yeah, sure.
[audience laughing]
So the next thing I did
was I attended a RailsBridge workshop.
Thanks,I've done great.
I was absolutely terrified that I would be
the dumbest person
of this RailsBridge workshop.
Everyone else would know
how programming worked
and I would be the dumbest person there.
But I didn't realize that there's
nothing in the whole world
embarrassing about not knowing something.
It just means that I have
to learn it. Right?
[Apologies. We're experiencing technical difficulties]
Okay, I can try to go without this.
- Okay. - Okay.
[Rachel] So as it turned out
when I went to RailsBridge,
what I learned is that I knew
a lot more than I realized I did. Right?
I was talking to people about problems
and I was reading.
And what I needed was a way
to connect all those dots,
put all those things together.
So when I went to my first RailsBridge workshop,
my other students... I went into the like
the most beginning class
because I didn't know any better, right?
They said, "Are you a beginner?"
I said, "I'm a super beginner."
And then I get into my class
and all of my fellow students
would ask questions like,
"What's a symbol?"
"It's a lightweight string."
And, "What's rake?"
"It's really make."
"Why don't you know that," right?
So I was really obnoxious.
I'm sure my teachers hated me,
but it gave me this context of
"here's what I know."
and I don't get that any other way.
The other thing I realized
was that I had gotten this far
and I had this far to go, right?
- There we go. - Yay!
[Rachel] Okay, thank you.
[audience clapping and cheering]
- Whoa. Oh... - [inaudible]
[Rachel] Okay, I'm going to try to figure out
if I put all the content
that I have need to say onto my slides
because there are only pictures.
We'll see how this goes.
- [Technician] I'm Sorry - [Rachel] That's okay.
We all do the best we can.
Okay.
[:lightweightstring > rake bepedantic]
Oh yeah, and also that.
Okay, so I gained a greater context
for what I was learning [strikes key].
I have no idea what just to say here.
[laughter from the audience]
[git]
Oh yeah, can we say...
then we created study groups
out of that.
So, when I went to Railsbridge
I realized that I had a lot more
that I needed to learn, right?
I gained context for these bits
I had been learning in books.
So we started putting together
study groups.
If I realized that I didn't know how
version control worked,
we would get together
and we would learn git.
[tdd]
We realized that we didn't know
how testing works.
So we would get together
and we would study tdd.
[cs]
And we didn't understand
some core Computer Science concepts
because really, you can get started
really fast in Ruby and you don't have to learn that.
So we realized if we're really going
to do this for real,
we have to learn these things.
[learning, helping out]
So that's how I got started learning.
And then, once I kind of understood
the material,
I didn't stop going to Railsbridge.
I just started helping out.
So, transition. [Clicks mouse]
[woah: "I didn't know that!"]
So every time, someone would ask a question
at the Railsbridge workshop,
So I started TAing and teaching, right?
And every time someone would ask a question,
I would have to like explain it
and I would get a little bit better at understanding
what the foundational parts
of Ruby were.
For example, a great question
about hash.
"Oh let me go find that for you."
"Holy ***! I didn't know that," right?
That's how it went. [clicks mouse button]
[sighs] I really want my speaker notes.
[suppressing laughter]
[meta organizing]
So, around the time
I got my first programming job,
my first non-internship programming job,
Railsbridge had grown to the point
where the organizers of the workshops
needed people to organize them
They needed meta organizers.
And so I stepped into that role.
Broadly, what it means to be
a meta organizer at Railsbridge
is that you find people who want
to host a workshop,
you find people who want
to organize a workshop.
You find people willing to spend
their marketing budgets
on beer and babysitting.
So it's great.
So when I started doing that,
this is supposed to be
a picture of San Francisco.
We went from having--
I know...I'm not that good
[audience laughing]
We went from having one workshop,
once a quarter in the Bay area
to having workshops about,
I would say every month...
to every, like 18 days now.
How's that? Is that about accurate?
And we just have as many around the world.
So we're having a ton of workshops. [clicks mouse button]
And when the workshops happen
at the same time,
they Skype with each other from across the world,
and they wave at each other. It's great.
[railsbridge...side track to starfish]
So that's how I got into Railsbridge.
That's what Railsbridge is doing.
Now I want to take you on a sidetrack
into Starfish. [clicks mouse button]
[The Starfish and the Spider]
So, one of our...
We have two founders of Railsbridge,
Sarah Allen and Sarah May.
And Sarah Allen read this book,
"The Starfish and the Spider"
[by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom]
And she asked us all to read it.
I can't entirely recommend this book.
I was very frustrated
by some parts of it.
If this book about "opensourcing" things
had been open sourced,
I really would've submitted a lot of pull requests,
but it's not. [clicks mouse button]
So broadly, to give away the thesis
there are hierarchical organizations
that rely on their leaders for the direction
and their vision. [clicks mouse button]
There are alternatively
some flat and leaderless organizations,
and broadly, what it means
to be an open organization
like this, is that the people
doing the work,
determine the direction
of the entire organization. [clicks mouse button]
So the best companies
that want to remain innovative
and profitable,
find a way to combine these elements.
That's when I get on [Seallick].
[audience laughing]
Okay. [clicks mouse button] Okay, so in the book,
the hierarchical organizations
correspond to spiders.
Spiders are one unit that kind of knows
everything about it's web
and can make decisions as like
a unified...as a unit, right?
And they can execute on that idea. [clicks mouse button]
In my version of this story,
because I want to draw my own pictures,
there's like a leader,
there's a queen bee
and there are worker bees.
And it's assumed in this model
that the queen bee has all of the knowledge
and that the worker bees have
craft and technical knowledge
that they use to execute
on the queen bee's vision.
So the queen is supposed to have a vision
for everything
but that's...but if you limit what you...
if you limit your set
of decision-makers,
then you narrow the scope
of the evolution for that organization
that you have.
- [inaudible] - Okay.
- You think? - That's okay.
Yeah, great.
[audience laughing]
Sweet!
[technician] Wait, why did I do that?
[audience laughing]
[clicks mouse furiously]
- What's my...? - What is happening?
[some laughter from the audience]
Oh, I know why.
I got it.
One second.
[audience laughing]
[laughs] This is probably a flat organization.
I'm just going to say that.
[audience laughing]
Okay. [laughs]
[laughs]
So there are worker bees,
and worker bees have a lot of knowledge
about what they're doing.
They don't have a great ability
to stretch, to push the organization
in one way or another.
Alternatively,
So, starfish don't have a centralized range.
It's kind of a downer.
On the other hand it has
a hidden benefit.
To illustrate that,
there was a voracious, like, starfish epidemic
off the coast of Australia
that was destroying coral.
And so, the well-meaning divers
of Australia
banded together and they set out
to kill the starfish one by one.
Unfortunately, they were killing them
by cutting them in half with a knife.
This is really effective for almost every other form
of life on the planet
but not for starfsh.
So starfish are regenerative
and if you cut them half with a knife
in a couple of months,
you have two starfish.
[laughter from the audience]
So these well-intention divers doubled the number
of predators on the coral. [clicks mouse]
You see the benefit right?
You don't have a brain and on the other hand,
you can evolve and survive things
[audience laughing]
So in my world,
this just means there are a lot of
worker bees.
There are no queen bees here,
and open organizations
definitely rely on certain individuals
for organization or for inspiration
but that's not the same thing
as having a queen bee.
Okay, so that was my side-track into Strarfish.
Now, I want to bring you back to Railsbridge.
So, Railsbridge in its early days
was headed in a very spidery direction.
We had two leaders
and they were asking their friends
to do things for them.
Unfortunately, those two leaders
are full-time engineers with families,
and lives.
So it was like cutting starfish in half...er
cutting a spider in half.
So this magical thing happened.
Sarah Allen read this book
and she asked us all
if we were doing anything
for Railsbridge
that no one else knew how to do
if we could find someone
and recruit them,
and teach them what we do.
In the sense, she asked us all
to startfish ourselves, right?
We need to grow our organization
and this is the way to do it.
So in my case,
I showed up to meet someone
who is going to organize a workshop
and she immediately yelled at me
for picking a...as soon as we met.
She wandered all over the restaurant,
and she said,
"I thought that might be you...."
"...But why would you be so dumb..."
"...as to pick a table without enough chairs?"
And I realized, that was my starfish.
[audience laughing]
She was the person
that I would need to help me
evolve this organization.
So Lily is organized,
and she thinks about things
like three steps ahead.
I'm very good at skating on chaos.
And so this thing
that the book predicted
really did happen,
and that is, when we starfished ourselves
we evolved as well.
We now have two skill sets
solving all of our problems.
So it was great.
Okay. So that's Railsbridge as as starfish.
This doesn't quite solve our problem though.
We want just to not just affect
people in the Bay Area.
So Railsbridge as an organization...
Did I go backwards?
Okay...
So Railsbridge as an organization
wants to change the world.
We have this ambitious goal.
We don't just want to help
women program in San Francisco,
we want to make programming accessible
to everyone all over the world.
We want to be a starting point
for anyone who has this goal.
All of our curriculum is open-sourced.
If you feel like you can contribute in this way,
take what we have,
make that the starting point.
and go do your thing,
So, we have some scaling problems. [clicks mouse button]
Community is hard to scale. [clicks mouse button]
[O (1)]
That's my punchline!
Okay.
[audience laughing and clapping]
If I had my speaker notes...
Okay. So, [laughs] for example...
Every time...so I know
lots of people are writing
really fantastic books for people
who want to level up as programmers.
They're making podcasts,
they're making tutorial videos.
Every time you make a video,
it can scale almost infinitely.
It's O (1) right?
It's constant time.
You create the book at one time,
you affect lots and lots of people
by [contrast]...so, there's my punchline.
By contrast, every time we want
to start up a Railsbridge workshop,
we have to find money,
we have to find volunteers,
we have to find organizers,
we have to find a venue,
so it's not constant time. It's O(n).
Every person
that we want to affect,
we have to go out and get them
and we have to work for that.
[O (n)]
Unfortunately...oh wait.
Fortunately, we're an organization
full of engineers,
full of creative solutions for scaling.
So we have some ideas.
Let's go back to the... to some examples.
[Scaling is hard... what are our options?]
[Case Study: Starbucks]
Okay. So my first case study
in how to scale Railsbridge
is look at Starbucks.
So this is the building in Seattle
from which all edicts come
for Starbucks [inaudible]
[audience giggling]
Do you guys recognize it?
So this is where the queen bees live,
and the queen bees have
a lot of knowledge.
They know how long it should take
to make every drink,
they know where the best beans are,
where some beans are,
[audience laughing]
They know how they need to...
...they know how every barrista needs
to work for Starbucks to deliver
an efficient experience
to all of it's over 20,000 locations
around the world.
So the barristas that we meet
every day at Starbucks
have a lot of expertise
about how to make coffee,
they know about Starbucks coffee,
There's a craft that they have
and they use that very efficiently deliver
all of our coffee everyday.
So this model scales really well, right?
As long as people want
Starbucks coffee, and want this product
this organizational style
is going to be fantastic
at delivering it to me. [clicks mouse]
So there's a queen bee here
I don't remember what I'm supposed
to say about it.
[audience laughs]
Oh that's what I'm [inaudible]
[audience laughing]
All my punchlines come first!
This is so dumb! Okay.
So, if we lose our queen bee
in this model, we hate to think
what will happen, right?
Like we don't trust our barristas
in this model without a queen bee.
This is what we get,
if we lose our queen bee.
[audience laughing]
This is unintentional humor, you guys. This is great. [laughs]
Okay, my next example of...
So there's some things [Case Study: Wikipedia]
that work there well for Railsbridge
I really like that they scale so well.
I don't want to have a leader
because that's how we end up
with spiders that like
feel like they're being torn in two.
So we take what we can
from there.
Wikipedia, that's my next case study.
So the way that Wikipedia gets
people to contribute,
is by having a vision
of collecting of all of human knowledge
that's exciting,
and it's engaging
and people want to help.
Sounds like Railsbridge right?
So there's no head
and every person just puts in what they can.
It's a little bit like a tributary
flowing into a river.
Every person's contribution is helping
the entire group of people
who want to consume Wikipedia.
[Case: Study: Alcoholics Anonymous]
Is that all I have?
This must be all I had.
So, some of this is really great
for Railsbridge, right?
We want one person's contribution
to benefit lots of people.
That sounds awesome.
[Case Study: Alcoholics Anonymous]
I have another case study,
Alcoholics Anonymous.
What's interesting about this case
is that it's not like Wikipedia.
It's essential to the vision
of Alcoholics Anonymous
that every group be independent
and that knowledge not spread
beyond the group.
The other thing that's interesting here is
that the overall organization
only contributes a little bit
to each one of these cluster of bees.
So they have a book.
It's distributed at cost,
and that's all
that the organization has done.
They have proclaimed their values,
they've given a methodology,
and they back away.
So this is a bit like silos
where each organization is very independent
and self-sufficient,
and that sounds fantastic.
So let's look at example of a combination,
of combining the best parts
of all these organizational styles.
I have a great example, the Internets.
[audience laughs]
[Case Study: the Internet]
Before I talk about
how the Internet actually works,
I'm going to talk about how
people were not quite
ready to understand
how the Internet works.
It's hard to draw the Internet, you guys.
[audience laughing]
So...Oh! Okay.
So [laughs]...so in 1995,
a young ISP Netcom hired a new CEO
to help them fundraise.
They were new.
They needed money.
And he was in meeting with French investors
-- it's not relevant to their French,
it's kind of funny that they're French
-- and over dinner -- sorry,
French people in the audience --
[audience laughing]
[Rachel laughing]
So, over dinner,
he tries to explain
how the Internet works, what an ISP is,
and what their business model would be.
And one of the investors just hounds him
demanding an answer to this question.
He won't let him move on
until he answers this question.
The question that he has
to have an answer to is,
"Who is the president of the Internet?" Right?
Like it doesn't enter his mind
that such a large organization
that seemingly works reliably
doesn't have someone in charge, right?
And so, our brave CEO is very determined,
and he tries to explain things
over and over.
And eventually,
just to move the conversation along
so he can get to the point
where he asks for money,
he says, “I am the president of the Internet.”
[audience laughs]
So, that's not actually how it works.
So each one of these is meant
to be an autonomous system.
And the way that the Internet works
is that an autonomous system can peer
with another system,
and they can share traffic.
They do this using
the Border Gateway Protocol,
which lets each user set the rules
for when traffic can access their network.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, maybe.
Okay, cool.
So this is fantastic, right?
This is great.
So each one of these is very hierarchical.
They want to make money.
They have a profit motive.
And yet, all of these
monopolistically-minded companies
manage to cooperate in building
something awesome.
It's kind of badass
especially for someone trying
to grow a global organization.
So, oh yeah, so I was going to explain.
This is an autonomous system.
It can't reach this autonomous system
over there.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. It explained it.
[audience laughing]
Okay, so those are
some organizational examples.
And now I want to go through those
and say all of the wonderful things
that I want to steal from them.
So from Starbucks,
I want to steal its structure.
If you come to RailsBridge and you say,
“I want to organize a workshop,”
I want to hand you something
just like Starbucks says,
“Do you want to be a barrista?..."
"...Here's how to make a cappuccino.”
I want to have that level of detail,
so that anyone who wants to volunteer
knows exactly how they can volunteer.
If you show up to be a volunteer
at a RailsBridge workshop,
I want to make
the best possible use of you, right?
I want to be able to take
what you have to give
and put it to the best possible use
for the organization.
So, love the structure.
From Wikipedia,
I really love that
if I give something to the organization,
it benefits everybody.
For example,
if I find a bug in the curriculum,
which happens rarely,
then I want to be able to change it
and benefit everybody.
What's more common is that Xcode
has found a new way
to be a pain in the ***,
[audience laughing]
and I want to be able
to fix that problem
for everyone as well.
So that's what I want to take
from Wikipedia. [clicks mouse]
This is a great point to mention
how you, too,
can become a tributary leading
to this wonderful river of knowledge.
So if you want to just use the curriculum,
take the curriculum out into the world
and do something with it,
here's where to get it.
[inastallfest.railsbridge.org/workshop] If you want to improve
the documentation that we have,
we have many curricula,
if you want to improve any of it,
go there.
[github.com/railsbridge/docs] And if you want to have a workshop
in your area, use our Cookbook.
[github.com/railsbridge/docs/wiki/Cookbook]
Yeah.
This is another great place
to mention my second favorite repo.
I have to say second favorite
because of the ladies in the front row.
[some laughter from the audience]
My second favorite repo
in the world is Ops School.
I'm really excited about this.
Just like RailsBridge wants
to create engineers,
they're trying to create operation engineers,
engineers.
And I'm super excited
because this weekend
they're going to have their first workshop
where they teach the curriculum
that everyone's been contributing to
for a while.
So yay!
[ops-school.readthedocs.org github.com/opsschool/curriculum]
Okay, and from Alcoholics Anonymous,
I want to steal the independence
and self-sufficiency.
So even though we have this curriculum
that everyone can contribute to,
every place that we have a workshop
still needs to find venues,
still needs to find volunteers,
still needs to find organizers.
And so despite all of our best efforts,
despite lots of generosity
from everywhere around the world,
every place that has a workshop
needs to be somewhat self-sufficient.
This is the coolest part.
So from the Internet,
I want to steal the ability
for lots of independent groups
to be able to talk to each other,
to share what's best
in what they've learned
in every organization,
and to share that back
with everybody else.
It's kind of awesome.
Okay, so those are some ideas
for how we can scale.
Let's bring it back. [clicks mouse]
This is a book --
so remember when I was like,
“The other book was kind of meh,”
this book is fantastic.
It spends ten pages
on the creation story of Unix Pipes.
[audience laughing]
They have their values in the right place.
So there's this great quote.
I'm going to read it to you
even if they say,
“Never return read from your slides.”
“Much of the history ..."
"...of computer programming..."
"...can be seen as the effort..."
"...to expand the franchise -- "
"...to make it easier..."
"...for more people to program.” [Steve Lohr, GOTO]
And when you read the book,
that really comes through.
There's FORTRAN.
There's COBOL.
Both of these started up --
these were our first
higher level languages,
and they started off
because they said,
“It simply is *** hard..."
"We should make it easier for people."
"We should have a higher-level language.”
What we ended up doing
was making it easier
for the professional programmers to program,
and we didn't really bring people in.
So I want to end with a story
of someone here, actually,
who is bringing in,
is like carrying out that goal
that people had for programming
for a long time.
There's a RailsBridge workshop
in this very space a few months ago,
and I came and I taught.
And I met Allison.
Allison is an accountant.
She is this person
that COBOL was made for.
Is Allison here?
Am I embarrassing?
That's awesome.
I can say whatever I want now.
[audience laughing]
[audience member clapping]
Okay, so Allison and I
worked through the curriculum,
the beginning curriculum,
and we called it a day.
We like high-fived.
We had a beer,
and then that was it.
And then she went home,
and she kept learning.
So I ran into her at a party recently,
and she told me
that she is making an app
to help with end-of-month accounting.
She is doing that exact thing
that Grace Hopper pushed for years ago
when she talked about automatic computing,
improving the way that computers
and people interact.
That's kind of *** amazing,
and RailsBridge is making it happen.
So thanks for listening.
I drew all my papers in paper.
And thanks to all my co-workers
who told me what was ***
about my talks so I made it better.
[laughing from the audience]
[audience clapping and cheering]
[Julie] You deserve at least 20 more minutes
of applause
for dealing with everything.
So we're going to take
a five-minute break,
at which point
we're going to set up
some fancy chairs,
and we're going to do
a little bit of panel discussion
and open QA with all of your guys.
QA, Q&A.
There we go.
Thank you, Rachel,
for just putting up
with that *** storm
and our technical team,
who is just dealing with it right now.
They're actually doing a great job.
So thank you guys all
for dealing with the lulls.
We'll be back in five.
[applause from audience]
[Github Presents Passion Projects] ♪ [music playing] ♪
So Rachel Myers,
thank you again
for dealing our complicated
technical situation.
You handled that very gracefully.
- So thanks. - Thanks.
[Julie] So have kind of like a list of questions
that I took down during your talk,
and we can just kind of
talk about them
and also I heard you're a fan
of whiskey.
[Rachel] I am.
[Julie] And so I broke out
a bottle of our slow merge whiskey.
You guys did this?
And I deliberately made yours
a little taller than mine
[audience laughing]
- So we can do--- - So cheers?
- Yeah, let's cheers. - Cheers.
Cheers to Rachel Myers.
No. Cheers!
Cheers!
[Rachel laughing]
Awkward silence while we drink, enjoy.
[audience member] I have a question about the whiskey.
[Julie] Yeah.
[audience member] Can you clarify?
[Julie] Can I clarify that it's whiskey?
[audience member] There's a picture of a cat on it, no?
Yeah, we had those labels.
This is -- I don't even know
if I'm supposed to talk about this
legally to be honest.
[audience laughing]
We had this made
for employees internally.
We just basically made a label
for it's like four roses I think.
- [audience member] Cool! - [Julie] Yeah, it's pretty tasty.
[Julie] I mean, they gave us the barrel,
that it was slow merged in.
I'm going to stick with that theme.
My first question is what did you do?
So we started your talk
with you are a programmer,
and you also teach at RailsBridge,
you volunteer,
and these are your passions.
But like, where did you start?
Like before you were skating on chaos,
what did you do
before you were programming?
[Rachel] Okay, so before I was a programmer,
- I was a philosophy teacher at-- - [audience member] What?
[Rachel holds back laughter]
[audience laughs]
So, what that actually means is
I was TAing for like
first-year undergraduate students
who needed a humanities credit.
I know that it's possible
for some of my students to see this.
So if you're watching, it's not you,
but most of my students
didn't give a ***.
[audience laughing]
And, it was kind of demoralizing
because you spend your life reading
and getting really into the details.
You don't feel like
you're doing something with it,
and you don't feel like
most people care.
So I still really love philosophy.
It's not what I do now
because I want to feel like
I'm doing a little bit more.
Cool. That's awesome.
How many people here
studied computer science in college?
Wow! That's actually a lot of people.
Surprised!
We have--we have a-- [Ted] Here!
We have a philosophy
[everyone laughs]
We have a philosophy major at GitHub and--
[Rachel] I've met and fought
with Ted over drinks.
[Julie] Nice. I think Ted's watching.
He's out there waiting,
watching, creeping.
[everyone laughs]
Sorry, Ted.
So, did you ever consider like
computer programming when you were
in school before college?
So when I was in Brownies,
one of our badges was to learn binary,
and I did that.
That was like the extent of it.
[audience laughing]
[woman from the audience] You'd need to learn binary in the Brownies?
[Rachel] Like they ask you,
like you can translate to
base 2 essentially, right?
So I would write a sentence,
and then I would like translate
into ones and zeroes,
and then I got my badge.
[Julie laughs] And you never looked back?
No, I was like, I was like,
“Well, that was interesting..."
"...I'm not sure what anyone..."
"...does with that..."
"...Let's move on,” right? So...
Brownies could do a better job
of how that relates to life. [laughs]
[Julie] That's amazing. You talked a little bit about
open source and
how it's a wonderful thing.
What was your gateway drug
into open source?
Like, what was your first open source project?
Honestly, my first open-source project
was that I couldn't make them
by default private, right?
Like and so everything
I started doing
like, by default if you're poor,
and you want to use Github
it just becomes an open-source project.
[Julie and audience laughing]
So, [laughs] so I got to say it that way.
Good business model.
But then, like my first serious
open-source project?
So when we would work on
when like we would get together
in little study groups,
we would work through
examples from books.
And I would see
someone's example and say,
“Well, what if we do it this way,”
and you know,
really went into depth.
And so that kind of interaction
was probably like my first introduction.
Okay.
[Rachel] which is different from like
a production ready
open-source project,
- [Julie] Right.-- - [Rachel] Right.
[Julie] Yeah.
Where the standards
are a little higher, hopefully.
Some places, some places.
Awesome. Well, that's
a pretty good answer.
I only have a couple more questions.
So if you guys start
thinking of things
that you want to ask Rachel,
feel free to --
you have a question.
That was easy.
[a woman from the the audience] So,
we got spiders,
we got starfish.
[Rachel] Okay.
I'm guessing RailsBridge...
Did not Sarah Allen say,
“Be starfish”
and everyone was starfish, right?
Like it's probably something
that the organization
is going to have to revisit.
Do you think that --
how do you think we should --
I'm sorry if no one else
cares about RailsBridge,
[everyone laughs]
how do you think an organization
like RailsBridge goes
from spider to starfish
and then doesn't re-spider.
Okay. That's a great question.
Do you want to repeat it for everyone?
[Julie] It was really long.
How does an organization
like RailsBridge go from spider
to starfish
without going back to spider?
Awesome.
[Julie] Cycles.
Yeah, how do we not fall
back into spider-ing?
- Right, yeah. - Okay...
So one, I think that --
so it's a really great point.
We try to starfish,
and it's been a couple of years.
We probably need
to continue to spider
… er... starfish.
And I've been tempted to spider in my days.
So, when Steven [Bing]
wanted a conference bio,
I wanted some way to represent
his contributions
to the organization.
So I suggested on text
to several people,
“Hey, how about we have a core team?"
"...Just see if we can be..." "
...on the core team,” right?
That--[laughs] That was my idea.
And then I realized
that's a terrible idea, right?
So some of the things
that RailsBridge can do
to avoid becoming a spider
are to avoid having a core team,
to continue to starfish--
and by continue to starfish,
I don't want to be like,
I don't want to make it sound easy, right?
Like what the means is
you find people who are
as committed as they need to be
like very committed,
and find a way for them
to contribute in a way
that they can, right?
So I found Lily
because Lily was really,
she had a clear vision
of how things should happen,
and that was exactly what we needed.
To continue to do that,
I think you just have
to continue meeting people,
and finding people,
and starfishing them into like,
your other starfish.
[Julie chuckles]
I don't know.
Does that answer your question?
Does that not quite answer
your question?
[a woman from the audience] Yes, but.
There's a but.
How do you make sure
that your starfishes are happy
to be starfish?
Lily, are you upset
about being my starfish? [laughs hysterically]
The question was – wait,
what was it?
Can you say that? I'm sorry. Sorry.
So I think starfishes are
super interesting,
but this whole core team thing,
what if people make
praisingcrazy contributions like Steven has,
and you say,
“No, you can't be on the core team..."
"...because we don't have one,”
how do you then go in
and say like, “but we love you..."
"...and thank you so much”?
Steven's here so maybe
we can just say,
can we have a party
or something? Would that, like--
Would you feel appreciated? [laughs hysterically]
[woman from the audience] How can we get involved with this?
So the original question was,
"How do you know that," or
"How do you ensure
that your starfish are happy being starfish?"
[Steven] Please, less work for me.
I'm not sure, I guess,
is the ultimate answer.
That's okay.
- Okay. - Okay.
We'll have to all work on that.
That's cool.
So I have another programming question.
Okay.
I hope you're not bored with these yet.
[Rachel stifles a laugh]
So there are so many different languages,
and specific disciplines in programming.
Like, how do you--
I think it's really common for,
new learners to just be
kind of overwhelmed especially
if they don't immediately click
with something.
There's like they're not getting
that immediate satisfaction,
they get overwhelmed with it,
and they kind of just shut down,
and they're like,
“No, programming is not for me.”
So how do you pick the language?
How did you pick Ruby?
Or how did you, you know, is it --
it can't be solely based
on organizations like RailsBridge, right?
Like there needs to be like
a different avenue.
[Rachel] So I'm betting that
it can totally be based on
organizations like RailsBridge,
but that won't be my answer.
So I got into programming Ruby
because of Why.
Like, there's a very like direct connection.
Like, this was my first book.
This book seemed accessible,
and I just like decided
I'm just going like
power through this book
and try to learn it. Right?
Like after you put so much
into learning one language,
there's like I was disincentivised
to go try to do Python immediately.
I went to like finish Ruby through
and feel like I understood that.
And like how you choose
your first language, I think,
is very accidental.
[Julie] Right. Do you think it has
a lot to do with like trends?
Like, I know like, Ruby on rails
and like, Webstart apps,
it's like very popular right now
so like, I'm not saying
that's specifically like why
a few of us have chosen it,
but like do you think
that has a big impact?
It must have a big impact.
- [Julie] Right. Yeah.-- - [Rachel] Right?
Like the more --
so Ruby was terrific,
a terrific starting language for me
because so much of the community
is invested in building up
projects for people to learn.
So there was never
a shortage of projects,
of cones, of like exercise
to the reader. Right?
There were always many
of those for me,
so many that like I always felt like,
“Oh, I have to do three more today..."
"...because there were these..."
"...eight new repos that showed up today.”
So I would say like it's accidental,
but Ruby made it very easy for me.
Gateway language, you would say?
- Exactly. - Cool.
Do I have any other questions
from you guys? Yeah?
[audience member] Mine is very short. and it's just--
I'm not familiar with RailsBridge,
and I kind of wanted to know kind of
the scope or the size
of the organization
so you know approximately
how many people are involved
in the project?
That's part of being
a flat organization is that
we're really bad--
it's a little bit like
Alcoholics Anonymous, right--
to have a chapter of--
Oh, wait. Do you want to repeat? Sorry.
[Julie] Yeah, I can repeat it.
So I think one of our audience members
wants to know
what the scale of Railsbridge
actually is, like,
the number of people, right?
- [Julie Ann Horwath] I think it's at-- - [audience member] Ball park.
Ball park
[Julie] Ball park.
Rachel does not have these
tattooed on her forearm.
I'm looking at her right now, turns out.
So part of being
like Alcoholics Anonymous in addition to--
never mind, I'm not going
to make a bad joke--
[laughter from the audience]
is that we're not good
at sending information back
to headquarters, as it were.
So we started to get better at that,
but we still have
about four years of data that's missing.
So it's hard to estimate.
What we can say is like
what the RSVP limit generally is
like on average and then do multiplication
for the workshops
that we know about.
And like at this point,
it's something like 100,000 people.
Wait, what is it?
Lily, you're here.
[Lily] I mean, more like 5,000 people
in San Francisco
have ever attended a workshop
as a student or volunteer.
- [Rachel] Is that true?-- - [Lily] But,
- [Rachel] Okay. - [Lily] that's
other cities. But, that doesn't include--
that's just except for media,
doesn't include all the other cities
that we have workshops in
so it might be more like 8,000.
[audience member] Okay. And like organizers,
the number of organizers just
- not participants.-- - [Lily] Like ten.
[audience member] Okay, cool.
[Julie] No, no, not ten.
Not really ten, like 50.
[some audience members laughing]
It's not very many.
[Rachel] I'm starting to think that
Lily and I like work in
different organizations.
[everyone laughing]
Not the greatest starfish
[some laughter from the audience]
So the correct answer is we don't know.
[audience member laughing]
[Juile] Who's fighting harder?
[Julie] Okay.
[Julie] Hi.
[woman from audience] How many people have gone on
to become Ruby developers
like yourself
from having gone
to this organization?
[Julie] The question was how many people
have gone on to become
Ruby developers from this organization?
I have only anecdotal knowledge of this
because we're bad at sending
information back up the hierarchy
because it's not a hierarchy.
The people that I kind of like
moved with when I was going
through RailsBridge
are almost now all engineers,
and that's entirely anecdotal.
And it's about like the people
who I was around.
So I can say there are
at least 10 of us, right?
[Rachel and audience laughing]
[Julie] Which is more female engineers
than I've ever worked with
at any company
so that's a pretty good number
I would say.
So I have one more question.
It's kind of a big one.
I'll let you think.
I'll maybe let you drink on it.
So one of the reasons
that I started Passion Projects
was to get Github--
get Github, that's such
a hard thing to say--
get Github more involved in
sort of these grassroot efforts with
not just women
but also in teaching and learning.
And like there are a ton of people
at Github who volunteer
with RailsBridge,
and Rails Girls and
a couple other organizations
but on a grander scale,
what can Github do
to make it easier
to learn to program?
So, I think Github
is particularly well-positioned
to minimize like the costs
that you pay
to get into programming
because you go to Github like
as soon as you have written
your first like three lines of code,
you want to like start posting,
and you want to show your friends.
I think, well,
there are tons of good answers.
And in this particular audience,
it's like I'm not the most expert
on what Github can do.
Like I have some things
that people can do
and all organizations can do or like
giving engineers the time
to like spend time mentoring, right?
Those kinds of projects.
When you have projects
that bring more people in,
and I don't mean to make it
even about women exclusively,
I mean to say all forms of diversity,
like that's a huge step
like to show people,
to sit down with people
and work through problems
the way that you
would work through them
shows people that they can
work through those problems
in the same way.
- [Julie] That's awesome.-- - [Rachel] So yeah.
[Julie] And I raise this to be kind of like
a second part,
but I'm assuming that's something
you look for in a company
you want to work for.
My next questions was,
when you were looking at companies
and you joined ModCloth,
like what are the attributes
of a company that you look for?
So, when I joined ModCloth,
they told me,
when I talked to the recruiter,
they said we're 80% women as a company.
And I didn't ask the follow-up question,
how many women are
on your engineering team?
[audience laughing]
I just assumed, right? [laughs]
There were none. I was the first one.
And now I ask much harder questions.
Like now we have a terrific team
on the team
that I work with every day.
We are 50% women,
which is fantastic.
[audience clapping]
They're in the back.
They're enjoying the applause right now.
[laughter from the audience]
And so like we're very good
at holding our company accountable.
We work with our CTO
to make sure that the way
that we're presenting ourselves
to the world maximizes like
the good candidates
that we're getting in.
I guess that's how you say it.
[Julie] That's awesome. Okay.
Well, thank you, Rachel.
Do you guys have
any more questions.
I know I missed someone. Yeah?
[male attendee] I was just going to ask
have you seen among the starfish
any plans for more prolonged interaction
with RailsBridge?
RailsBridge is amazing for building
enthusiasm over two days,
not getting the snowball rolling.
Have you seen anybody
try to engage over months?
Yeah, that's--oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Have you seen any long term--
I don't know
what's a good word for that--like,
- [male attendee] continued study. - [Julie] continued learning
or continued studying
through RailsBridge specifically?
So sometimes people will
spontaneously create study groups.
Another thing that I have to say
is Women Who Code
is great at forming
long term study groups
so the person who runs the Ruby.
And is it Ruby specific or Ruby on Rails?
[Lily] Tuesdays.
So Ruby Tuesdays
is the Women Who Code group
that does like an ongoing,
every single Tuesday,
they'll have a meet up
where they work on
their rails project.
They also have ones
for iOS and JavaScript.
I'm probably leaving others out.
So that's one example.
That's women-specific
in the way that RailsBridge is like --
oh, and it came off Rails Ridge.
That's awesome. I didn't know that.
It's good to have
all the starfish in the room
in a talk like this.
Awesome. Any more questions? Yeah?
[female attendee] When you were starting
to learn how to program,
when was the kind of transition
when you felt comfortable enough
that you wanted to enter
in the professional team?
[Julie] This is really interesting.
So it was...the question was
what was the point at which
you felt comfortable in like
going on an interviews
and entering the professional world
of programming?
So I was working examples
kind of on my own,
and I would go to a lot of meetups
because that was another way
to get a sense of
where I stand and what I need
to learn after this.
And I guess the short answer is
I never felt that way.
I felt that way long after
I had been doing it.
[Julie] I don't think anyone ever feels like
they know everything
because the thing about technology
is it moves so quickly,
and everything changes so fast.
Like I don't think it's like
everyone is ever going to like,
"Okay, we're done. We're done.
We don't have to learn anymore."
Like, you're always constantly having
to learn or you're going to get behind.
So it's really hard
to feel comfortable
- [Julie] like, yeah - [Rachel] Right.
Just a quick side track.
There was Justice Breyer
who was on Charlie Rose
like years ago,
and he was talking about
trying to encourage his son
who didn't want to do his homework.
And he said,
“Oh, you should get used to this..."
"...because if you're really smart..."
"...and you work really hard..."
"...and you're pretty lucky,"
"...you can do this..."
"...for the rest of your life.” Right?
And that's what it's like
to be programmer, right?
If you get good at learning,
you're going to get to do this
for the rest of your life,
and that's what you're aiming for.
Yeah, there's a really great quote.
I don't know where this comes from,
but “learn to learn.”
is basically like the way,
like teaching yourself to be resourceful
is probably like the best gift
you can give yourself.
And kind of that's job security.
That's what that is.
And then I have one story
about how I started.
And that is I was at a meet up,
and Sarah Allen,
before she had started RailsBridge,
said, “You know I find it really hard..."
"...to find junior people to hire..."
"...Like if you have a great junior person..."
"...I would love to pair with them..."
"...in my spare time.”
And I was sitting in the back,
I said, I just shouted out obnoxiously,
“I would pair with you for free..."
"...if you want to do that some time.”
And so she brought me in to interview,
and she's like,
“Well, you're definitely going to be..."
"...pairing with me for free..."
"...but you can if you want.”
So yes. That's how I got into it.
And then I worked there for free
for a long time.
And then I became like the real intern,
and then I like moved on.
And at every step I always feel like
I'm jumping a little bit ahead
of where I really belong,
but, oh well, so it goes.
All right. Thank you guys
so much for coming out.
- We're actually having-- - [Rachel] Thank you!
Sorry, Melissa, don't get too excited.
So we're actually throwing
a drink up nearby at the Alchemist
I think is the name of the bar,
and they look like
they have really good cocktails
and they're free because they're on GitHub.
So come help me spend our money
and celebrate you guys all
coming out for our first talk.
[audience applauding]
[Rachel] Thanks
[audience applauding and cheering]
♪ [music playing] ♪
[GitHub Presents: Passion Projects, Rachel Myers]