Mommy, where do Rubyists come from?

[Paul Gallagher]

All the recent discussions and flurry of "we're hiring" emails on the SRB and hackerspace lists got me back to thinking about this long-running topic of conversation.

Lots of positive things are happening: RedDotRubyConf for one, the presence locally of companies like Pivotal Labs, and there's no shortage of work to be had.

But are things evolving fast enough; is there more to do? When I listened to Neal Sales-Griffin talk about CodeAcademy on twist #230 I couldn't help think how great it would be if something similar was already running here.

So although this topic may be more meta than usual, I'd like to put it on the agenda for the next SRB meet - although maybe just as a short discussion topic during the meetup, to be continued by those interested as a dinner conversation afterwards:

• Where do Rubyists come from?
  
• Can this scale? What's going to work in future?
  
• [I may be mistaken, but I think of us mainly as self-taught wanderers from other language communities;-)]
• Who's currently active in building supply? [internships, training, IHLs etc]
• What's working? e.g.
  
• Taking on grads/entry-level and training up?
• Cross-training from other communities? Which works best - from Java, .NET, other/any...?
• Outsourcing?
  
• As interested parties (startup founders, consultancies/agencies, trainers) how are we addressing supply? Are there things we could do as an "industry forum" that we can't or don't want to do individually?
• Or do we just accept the fact that if you can't poach, you just need to bite the bullet and train/cross-train? 
  

Cheers, and hope I'm not just going to have this conversation with myself!
Paul

[Sau Sheong Chang]

On my part, I'm training (not directly) up the team in HP Labs
Singapore and we have some projects in the labs that are either fully
running Rails or partly running Rails. This includes both experienced
developers as well as interns. I'm also in the process to training our
development partners, to boost the ecosystem. While this is not
entirely for altruistic reasons (I believe using Ruby and Rails is
more efficient and makes for happier developers) I hope this helps to
inject more people with the skill and know-how into our local
industry.

On Feb 12, 9:13 pm, Paul Gallagher <gallagher.p...@gmail.com> wrote:
> All the recent discussions and flurry of "we're hiring" emails on the SRB
> and hackerspace lists got me back to thinking about this long-running topic
> of conversation.
>
> Lots of positive things are happening: RedDotRubyConf for one, the presence
> locally of companies like Pivotal Labs, and there's no shortage of work to
> be had.
>
> But are things evolving fast enough; is there more to do? When I listened
> to Neal Sales-Griffin talk about CodeAcademy on twist

> #230<http://www.thisweekinstartups.com/blog/neal-sales-griffin-of-code-aca...>I

> couldn't help think how great it would be if something similar was
> already running here.
>
> So although this topic may be more meta than usual, I'd like to put it on
> the agenda for the next SRB meet - although maybe just as a short
> discussion topic during the meetup, to be continued by those interested as
> a dinner conversation afterwards:
>

>    - Where do Rubyists come from?
>    - Can this scale? What's going to work in future?
>       - [I may be mistaken, but I think of us mainly as self-taught

>       wanderers from other language communities;-)]

>    - Who's currently active in building supply? [internships, training,
>    IHLs etc]
>    - What's working? e.g.
>    - Taking on grads/entry-level and training up?
>       - Cross-training from other communities? Which works best - from
>       Java, .NET, other/any...?
>       - Outsourcing?
>       - As interested parties (startup founders, consultancies/agencies,

>    trainers) how are we addressing supply? Are there things we could do as an
>    "industry forum" that we can't or don't want to do individually?

>    - Or do we just accept the fact that if you can't poach, you just need

[Carl Coryell-Martin]

This sounds like a great discussion and I'd love to have an in person meeting about it.

I'm trying to refactor the singapore government procurement process to support agile software development practices and to allow using non-java languages like Ruby.

In doing so I hope to train 10s of engineers in doing rails in a agile fashion. 

The UK rails community has had great success with this. A few shops have banded together to build the agile delivery network and currently UK government software procurement prefers agile practices over waterfall.

cheers,

Carl C-M

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[Andy Croll]

Indeed.

I'm trying to get in front of as many grads as possible, spoke at the
NUS Hackers event on Friday night. I even gave up Friday beers! I'm
also speaking to the NUS SoC later in Feb. Its not as impenetrable as
the Gahmen, but I've had my battles. :-)

As for RDRC, I'd love to reach into the local non-rubyists - the theme
of the conference is broadly 'improving yourself as a developer' and
I'm trying to get rubyists who have a somewhat holistic view of a
software development career, and are into the 'craft' of development,
Ruby or not. Whoever has any good links to the non-Rails development
community feel free to push the conference at them.

More specifically, one of the speakers is a software trainer by trade
and I know he is keen to do a paid training or two while he's here.
Any companies interested should ping me, I'll be pestering the usual
suspects. :-)

Andy

On Feb 12, 9:59 pm, Carl Coryell-Martin <c...@coryellmartin.org>
wrote:

> This sounds like a great discussion and I'd love to have an in person
> meeting about it.
>
> I'm trying to refactor the singapore government procurement process to
> support agile software development practices and to allow using non-java
> languages like Ruby.
>
> In doing so I hope to train 10s of engineers in doing rails in a agile
> fashion.
>
> The UK rails community has had great success with this. A few shops have
> banded together to build the agile delivery network and currently UK
> government software procurement prefers agile practices over waterfall.
>
> cheers,
>
> Carl C-M
>

[Paul Gallagher]

Sau Sheong, Carl, Andy - wow, the work you are doing blows me away. kudos!

Unless you are keen to do something sooner, I'd suggest we formally arrange a dinner after the next SRB meet to chew over strategies, share what we know and plan things to do next.

I had the distinct feeling you three would be up for it, but an open invite to all interested parties.

Paul

[Keith Bennett]

How about a half or whole day before or after the next RDRC for a regional summit to discuss these issues, perhaps in an open space conference format?

There would be lots of quality people from all over the region, and I'm sure this is an issue for them as well.

To take it to an extreme, if there were a two day conference before or after RDRC just for this, you might get a boatload of non-Rubyists around the region to join you -- maybe even executive types who could help advocate and implement intelligent solutions. If it's open space, it's a lot less work than a traditional conference. It wouldn't have to be large; in fact, the quality of communication is best in my experience when the group is smaller -- 100 would be plenty, and even 30 would be good.

I don't know how it is in Singapore, but in the US, in my experience at least, developers and executives/management are pretty isolated from each other. Maybe we need to build more bridges.

- Keith

[Andy Marks]

A big +1 for broadening the discussion to beyond "just" Ruby/RoR and into a wider discussion around how we (as developers) help understand and communicate our value our current and potential employers.  I believe the sooner we can start talking about how we can better help solve real business problems the easier we will be able to engage the executive and business decision makers who seem to be a big part of the situation we now see ourselves in.  From their perspective, technology is a means to an end and we need to recognise this as well.  

For example, the Ruby platform is a great tool for solving a decent sized subset of common business problems but (for example) the prevalence of software running in multicore environments should be forcing many of us to have a naturally parallel language in our virtual toolkit as well.  I think we should all be looking to the Erlangs, F#s, Haskells, Clojures and the like as complimentary tools to keep us delivering high-end value to our customers and employers once Ruby/RoR has reached the development masses. 

p.s  Was speaking to some computing students at NTU last week and one of them said they only saw doing development as being a job for 3-5 years.  Terribly small sample size I know, but it sounds like there might be some influencing around this stuff happening before many hit the workforce.

p.s Kudos to Andy for (financially) encouraging students to attend RDRC.

Cheers,
Andy

Andy Marks

Technical Principal

ThoughtWorks Singapore

email: ama...@thoughtworks.com

mobile: +65 9788 0259

web: www.thoughtworks.com

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 11:24 PM, Andy Croll <andy...@deepcalm.com> wrote:

[Carl Coryell-Martin]

I'm in.

Do we have a date for the next SRB meeting?  i'm out of town feb 27 - march 5.

-ccm

[Subh]

Should be in the week of 5th.

Probably 7th or 8th of March.

Subh

Sent from my iPhone

[Jason Ong]

My 2 cents from few of my rubyist bulding projects :)

SRB

Low hanging fruit for folks to discover fellow rubyists. Finding folks to step out and talk about their project's the main challenge.

RailsGirls

Garnered lots of interests. We had over 300 applicants. Having a proper follow up program's the challenge.

RDRC

Great for discovering and building relationship with regional folks. Also to up ruby branding image with institutions like IDA, etc. 

Startup Lah

Increasing ruby pipeline with formal education is tough. The key stumbler - who's gonna be the sponsor to bear the cost of operation?

Cheers,
JasonOng

---
web: http://bit.ly/jasonong

[Thomas Kister]

Hello everyone,

This remark from Andy actually reminded me of something about students
in France. Usual disclaimer: not trying to generalize but you
typically have two types of students:
- the enthusiasts, for whom computers are a passion and who already
have some programming and networking skills before reaching the
university
- the others, who are there because "computers are the future" or
because they spend their time playing counter strike and think they
like computers

The first category is usually a minority. In the second category, many
people struggle with classes and tend to think that they will need to
just stay afloat for a few years then once their management skills are
recognized they will become project leader or manager and get their
hands out of coding. Back to France, I even read on some government
agencies orientation papers that a given course in CS would grant you
almost automatically an upgrade in your career after 3 to 5 years of
experience... I hope they stopped writing such stupid things, but then
I guess it was no surprise that we'd get so many people who thought
they didn't really need all that theoretical knowledge, because they'd
quickly climb the corporate ladder anyway.

My 2 cents,

Thomas

On 13 February 2012 09:25, Andy Marks <ama...@thoughtworks.com> wrote:
> p.s  Was speaking to some computing students at NTU last week and one of
> them said they only saw doing development as being a job for 3-5 years.
>  Terribly small sample size I know, but it sounds like there might be some
> influencing around this stuff happening before many hit the workforce.
>

> Cheers,
> Andy

[Wong Koi Hin]

In the Singapore context add a third category:

On 13 February 2012 13:04, Thomas Kister <leand...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The first category is usually a minority. In the second category, many
> people struggle with classes and tend to think that they will need to
> just stay afloat for a few years then once their management skills are
> recognized they will become project leader or manager and get their
> hands out of coding. Back to France, I even read on some government
> agencies orientation papers that a given course in CS would grant you
> almost automatically an upgrade in your career after 3 to 5 years of
> experience... I hope they stopped writing such stupid things, but then
> I guess it was no surprise that we'd get so many people who thought
> they didn't really need all that theoretical knowledge, because they'd
> quickly climb the corporate ladder anyway.
>

3) It is the only course available since all the more popular courses
are already taken.

Anyone who have been involved in hiring fresh grads or training them
know what I mean.

You have to start to wonder about the value of a local CS degree when
it is possible to graduate without being able to program at relatively
simple level.

Koi Hin

[Jason Ong]

Hiring fresh grad need not necessarily come from the CS pool? Extending it to folks who has the right aptitude and attitude?

I would have frowned if you had asked me to consider taking CS back in college (therefore I took engineering instead) but fast forward years later, how much things have changed in my journey of self discovery. Can't imagine going something else other than hacking, except music that is.

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[Wong Koi Hin]

Hi Jason,

On 13 February 2012 14:01, Jason Ong <velv...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hiring fresh grad need not necessarily come from the CS pool? Extending it
> to folks who has the right aptitude and attitude?

Agreed, and we did. I come from an engineering background myself.

Koi Hin

[Winston Teo]

Hey Andy,

What will you be talking about to NUS SoC? RDRC? I am an alumni, and I am also interested to know how I can reach out to my alma mater.

Thanks!

 
Cheers,
Winston

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 11:24 PM, Andy Croll <andy...@deepcalm.com> wrote:

[Winston Teo]

You have to start to wonder about the value of a local CS degree when
it is possible to graduate without being able to program at relatively
simple level.

I believe that the three categories apply for all courses, which is why we are graded on a bell curve.

i.e. There will be accountants who cannot balance accounts properly at the end of their course.

And so, there will be graduates who cannot program at a relatively simple level, 

but there will also be graduates who can give you beautiful code.

Our local CS degree shouldn't be demeaned, just because of some bad experience.

(p.s. I have a local CS degree)

Cheers,

Winston

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 1:34 PM, Wong Koi Hin <koi...@gmail.com> wrote:

[YJ Soon]

3) It is the only course available since all the more popular courses
are already taken.

Is this the case regionally? I assume not, since we seem to fill many of our CS places here with talented kids from Indonesia and Vietnam. What is it about Singapore, then, that makes CS (and really, many engineering disciplines) so unpopular—the sheer difficulty? I'm sure a few of us on this list remember CS and Comp Engineering as being two of the hardest courses to get into, especially compared to Biz and Arts, and the situation's flipped itself pretty neatly ever since the dot-com bust and never recovered. 

I ask because I keep hearing of a surge in interest in CS in the US, thanks to the Social Network movie and the like*. But it isn't happening here, and I'm terribly curious to hear people's perspectives on why. 

* http://singularityhub.com/2011/04/25/the-rise-of-gen-cs-computer-science-interest-at-stanford-skyrocketing/ ,  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/technology/11computing.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

[Jason Ong]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 12:15 AM, YJ Soon <y...@yjsoon.com> wrote:

I ask because I keep hearing of a surge in interest in CS in the US, thanks to the Social Network movie and the like*. But it isn't happening here, and I'm terribly curious to hear people's perspectives on why. 

Crash a CS lecture and talk to your neighbors. ;)

[Tamas Herman]

just came across another resource which looks quite promising,
so probably fits well into jason's list:
http://www.saas-class.org/

--
tom

[Ruiwen Chua]

Maybe you'd also like to get in touch with the NUS Hackers? They're also helping push the hacker culture in NUS =)

[Paul Gallagher]

Ah, God Bless Jessica Tan and her MDship of Microsoft and MPship on the side.

No correlation of course..

.. gahmen data centres use IIS Proxy because its the best product available, right?

[Peter]

I learned that NUS Hackers is former linuxNUS only a few days ago. Is
it because we are all Mac users now? Visited distrowatch.com today..
brings back so much memories...

On Feb 16, 3:24 pm, Ruiwen Chua <rwc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe you'd also like to get in touch with the NUS Hackers? They're also
> helping push the hacker culture in NUS =)
>

> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Winston Teo <winston.yong...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hey Andy,
>
> > What will you be talking about to NUS SoC? RDRC? I am an alumni, and I am
> > also interested to know how I can reach out to my alma mater.
>
> > Thanks!
>
> > Cheers,
> > Winston
>

[Ruiwen Chua]

Haha not the OS switch really. Some of the Coreteam are still on Linux =)

The name change was to reflect the change in focus, from a Linux/Open Source advocacy group to a group that pushes the hacker culture in general.