Mentoring, teaching, etc...
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Brian Cardarella
May 18, 2012, 1:52:17 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I'm breaking this off into another thread.
I think there needs to be a plan rather than just "do all of the things!"
My approach is to start small and build on what is working. IMO, the
first steps should be to add resources for learning to BostonRB.org.
This should probably include a listing of companies that are offering
mentor programs, workshops, suggested reading material, screen casts,
and individual local mentors.
After that is up and running we can have the discussion on what the
next steps should be.
I'm weary of people committing to teaching classes and running
workshops under "BostonRB". I feel everyone has the best of intentions
but the reality is the responsibility is time consuming. I don't want
people to come running out of the gate and lose steam quickly. So
let's take is slow.
- Brian
I think there needs to be a plan rather than just "do all of the things!"
My approach is to start small and build on what is working. IMO, the
first steps should be to add resources for learning to BostonRB.org.
This should probably include a listing of companies that are offering
mentor programs, workshops, suggested reading material, screen casts,
and individual local mentors.
After that is up and running we can have the discussion on what the
next steps should be.
I'm weary of people committing to teaching classes and running
workshops under "BostonRB". I feel everyone has the best of intentions
but the reality is the responsibility is time consuming. I don't want
people to come running out of the gate and lose steam quickly. So
let's take is slow.
- Brian
Mark Chang
May 18, 2012, 2:08:24 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I like this attitude toward progressing and keeping the passion flame lit :).
--
Mark L. Chang
I'll toss my hat in the ring and offer to help out where there is need. I don't want to lead, though.
My expertise is mostly in curriculum development, but I will volunteer for whatever I can if there is an open call for help.
Mark
- Brian
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Mark L. Chang
Kevin Bedell
May 18, 2012, 2:12:54 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
This sounds good.
I was thinking that maybe Dan and I could meet next week(or when we're
both available) to get a sense for what we might be able to do.
Obviously, we'd coordinate back through the list to get agreement.
Brian, Dan - what do you guys think?
-Kevin
I was thinking that maybe Dan and I could meet next week(or when we're
both available) to get a sense for what we might be able to do.
Obviously, we'd coordinate back through the list to get agreement.
Brian, Dan - what do you guys think?
-Kevin
Brian Cardarella
May 18, 2012, 2:14:26 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
That sounds like a good plan. What I posted above was just my 2 cents,
don't take it as what you should do if you feel there is a better path
to take.
don't take it as what you should do if you feel there is a better path
to take.
Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 2:15:16 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
OK I can meet next week.
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>
>
>
> --
> Mark L. Chang
>
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Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 2:27:24 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Your advice sounds pretty wise to me Brian.
Kevin, would you mind opening up the meeting next week to whoever is interested?
Maybe we can pick a cafe in Kendall Sq. (I assume that's the most neutral location) and a time.
Kevin Bedell
May 18, 2012, 2:38:44 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Sounds good. I'm thinking maybe Tuesday after work. I'll have to confirm.
Meadhall or the restaurant next to the dunkin donuts on the first
floor of the CIC building at One Broadway are good places that are
right there. ('good' of course meaning 'nice beer selection' ;-) )
>>> >> To post to this group, send email to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Meadhall or the restaurant next to the dunkin donuts on the first
floor of the CIC building at One Broadway are good places that are
right there. ('good' of course meaning 'nice beer selection' ;-) )
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>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > Mark L. Chang
>>> >
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>>> > Mark L. Chang
>>> >
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Bill Blanchard
May 18, 2012, 2:44:10 PM5/18/12
to Boston Ruby Group
As someone who is new to Rails, I'd love to see something like this.
I took one of the Thoughtbot courses, which was excellent, but having
some help progressing from there would be excellent. I'm not a
programmer in my day job, so I'd love to be able to mark out some time
to work with other people on and above my level.
Bill
On May 18, 2:38 pm, Kevin Bedell <ke...@kbedell.com> wrote:
> Sounds good. I'm thinking maybe Tuesday after work. I'll have to confirm.
>
> Meadhall or the restaurant next to the dunkin donuts on the first
> floor of the CIC building at One Broadway are good places that are
> right there. ('good' of course meaning 'nice beer selection' ;-) )
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Your advice sounds pretty wise to me Brian.
>
> > Kevin, would you mind opening up the meeting next week to whoever is
> > interested?
>
> > Maybe we can pick a cafe in Kendall Sq. (I assume that's the most neutral
> > location) and a time.
>
> > On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:15:16 PM UTC-4, Daniel Choi wrote:
>
> >> OK I can meet next week.
>
> >> On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:12:54 PM UTC-4, Kevin Bedell wrote:
>
> >>> This sounds good.
>
> >>> I was thinking that maybe Dan and I could meet next week(or when we're
> >>> both available) to get a sense for what we might be able to do.
> >>> Obviously, we'd coordinate back through the list to get agreement.
>
> >>> Brian, Dan - what do you guys think?
>
> >>> -Kevin
>
I took one of the Thoughtbot courses, which was excellent, but having
some help progressing from there would be excellent. I'm not a
programmer in my day job, so I'd love to be able to mark out some time
to work with other people on and above my level.
Bill
On May 18, 2:38 pm, Kevin Bedell <ke...@kbedell.com> wrote:
> Sounds good. I'm thinking maybe Tuesday after work. I'll have to confirm.
>
> Meadhall or the restaurant next to the dunkin donuts on the first
> floor of the CIC building at One Broadway are good places that are
> right there. ('good' of course meaning 'nice beer selection' ;-) )
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Your advice sounds pretty wise to me Brian.
>
> > Kevin, would you mind opening up the meeting next week to whoever is
> > interested?
>
> > Maybe we can pick a cafe in Kendall Sq. (I assume that's the most neutral
> > location) and a time.
>
> > On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:15:16 PM UTC-4, Daniel Choi wrote:
>
> >> OK I can meet next week.
>
> >> On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:12:54 PM UTC-4, Kevin Bedell wrote:
>
> >>> This sounds good.
>
> >>> I was thinking that maybe Dan and I could meet next week(or when we're
> >>> both available) to get a sense for what we might be able to do.
> >>> Obviously, we'd coordinate back through the list to get agreement.
>
> >>> Brian, Dan - what do you guys think?
>
> >>> -Kevin
>
> >>> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Mark Chang <mark.ch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> > I like this attitude toward progressing and keeping the passion flame
> >>> > lit
> >>> > :).
> >>> > I'll toss my hat in the ring and offer to help out where there is need.
> >>> > I
> >>> > don't want to lead, though.
>
> >>> > My expertise is mostly in curriculum development, but I will volunteer
> >>> > for
> >>> > whatever I can if there is an open call for help.
>
> >>> > Mark
>
> >>> > On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Brian Cardarella
> >>> > <bcardare...@gmail.com>
> >>> > I like this attitude toward progressing and keeping the passion flame
> >>> > lit
> >>> > :).
> >>> > I'll toss my hat in the ring and offer to help out where there is need.
> >>> > I
> >>> > don't want to lead, though.
>
> >>> > My expertise is mostly in curriculum development, but I will volunteer
> >>> > for
> >>> > whatever I can if there is an open call for help.
>
> >>> > Mark
>
> >>> > On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Brian Cardarella
Alex Jarvis
May 18, 2012, 2:57:06 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
> As someone who is new to Rails, I'd love to see something like this.
Seconded. I get a lot out of mentoring, and would really like to see this come to fruition!
---------------------------
Alex M. Jarviswww.AlxJrvs.com
'AlxJrvs' on Twitter
Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 2:58:06 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Meadhall sounds great!
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>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > Mark L. Chang
>>> >
>>> > --
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Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 3:04:09 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Kevin, just let me know what day and time works for you when you know it. I'm flexible and I'm fine with either Meadhall or the other place you mentioned.
Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 3:17:18 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Thanks for chiming in encouragingly, Alex and Bill. It's esp. awesome Bill that you're learning programming outside your day job. I would love our effort to support and encourage more people to do what you're doing, programming extra-professionally.
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> >>> > --
> >>> > Mark L. Chang
>
> >>> > --
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Dylan Cashman
May 18, 2012, 3:40:06 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Hey guys, I'd love to come on Tuesday if it's open. I'm in the area so I could meet at meadhall whenever.
--
Dylan Cashman
Annkissam - Mission Driven Systems
www.annkissam.com
One Broadway, 14th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142
Cell (preferred): 617-999-3634
Office: 617-401-2480, ext. 708
Fax: 617-507-5922
To post to this group, send email to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
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Dylan Cashman
Annkissam - Mission Driven Systems
www.annkissam.com
One Broadway, 14th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142
Cell (preferred): 617-999-3634
Office: 617-401-2480, ext. 708
Fax: 617-507-5922
Dan Croak
May 18, 2012, 4:21:00 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I'm in for Tuesday after work at Meadhall.
I created this interface prototype a while back, haven't had time to
push it forward, but would be happy to pass it on the Boston Ruby
Group if the group wanted to use it as a scheduling/connection tool:
http://mentor.so
Think it's important to mix disciplines, ie http://railsmentors.org is
too specific. It doesn't take long for Rails mentoring to turn into
Javascript MVC/Postgres/vim/growth hacking mentoring.
Thank you, Dan Choi, for volunteering to lead the effort!
I created this interface prototype a while back, haven't had time to
push it forward, but would be happy to pass it on the Boston Ruby
Group if the group wanted to use it as a scheduling/connection tool:
http://mentor.so
Think it's important to mix disciplines, ie http://railsmentors.org is
too specific. It doesn't take long for Rails mentoring to turn into
Javascript MVC/Postgres/vim/growth hacking mentoring.
Thank you, Dan Choi, for volunteering to lead the effort!
>>>> > >>> >> boston-r...@googlegroups.com
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>>>> >
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>>>> >
>>>> > >>> > --
>>>> > >>> > Mark L. Chang
>>>> >
>>>> > >>> > --
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>>>> >
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Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 4:32:40 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
It will be great to see you and get your ideas on Tuesday, Dan. (Date and time will hopefully be confirmed and set by end of weekend)
I don't want to be singled out here. It's Kevin too, and ultimately everyone who ends up donating time and skills for this.
That mentor.so site looks sweet to me. I think it will be great to be able to use it.
Totally agree that "Ruby/Rails mentoring" is somewhat inaccurate. But I think Ruby's culture & Matz's founding spirit will define the heart of this community no matter how varied the toolkit becomes.
>>>> > >>> >> boston-rubygroup@googlegroups.com
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>>>> >
>>>> > >>> > --
>>>> > >>> > Mark L. Chang
>>>> >
>>>> > >>> > --
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>
>
>
>
> --
> Dylan Cashman
> Annkissam - Mission Driven Systems
> www.annkissam.com
>
> One Broadway, 14th Floor
> Cambridge, MA 02142
> Cell (preferred): 617-999-3634
> Office: 617-401-2480, ext. 708
> Fax: 617-507-5922
>
> --
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Brendan Kemp
May 18, 2012, 4:41:31 PM5/18/12
to Boston Ruby Group
I'm interested—what time on Tuesday?
On May 18, 3:40 pm, Dylan Cashman <dylan.cash...@annkissam.com> wrote:
> Hey guys, I'd love to come on Tuesday if it's open. I'm in the area so I
> could meet at meadhall whenever.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for chiming in encouragingly, Alex and Bill. It's esp. awesome
> > Bill that you're learning programming outside your day job. I would love
> > our effort to support and encourage more people to do what you're doing,
> > programming extra-professionally.
>
> > On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:57:06 PM UTC-4, Alex M Jarvis wrote:
>
> >> > As someone who is new to Rails, I'd love to see something like this.
>
> >> Seconded. I get a lot out of mentoring, and would really like to see this
> >> come to fruition!
>
> >> ---------------------------
> >> Alex M. Jarvis
> >>www.AlxJrvs.com
> >> 'AlxJrvs' on Twitter
>
> >> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Bill Blanchard <bill.blanch...@gmail.com
> >>> boston-rubygroup@googlegroups.**com <boston-r...@googlegroups.com>
> >>> *com <boston-r...@googlegroups.com>
> >>> For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/**
> >>> group/boston-rubygroup <http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup>
On May 18, 3:40 pm, Dylan Cashman <dylan.cash...@annkissam.com> wrote:
> Hey guys, I'd love to come on Tuesday if it's open. I'm in the area so I
> could meet at meadhall whenever.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for chiming in encouragingly, Alex and Bill. It's esp. awesome
> > Bill that you're learning programming outside your day job. I would love
> > our effort to support and encourage more people to do what you're doing,
> > programming extra-professionally.
>
> > On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:57:06 PM UTC-4, Alex M Jarvis wrote:
>
> >> > As someone who is new to Rails, I'd love to see something like this.
>
> >> Seconded. I get a lot out of mentoring, and would really like to see this
> >> come to fruition!
>
> >> ---------------------------
> >> Alex M. Jarvis
> >>www.AlxJrvs.com
> >> 'AlxJrvs' on Twitter
>
> >>> > >>> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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>
> >>> > >>> > --
> >>> > >>> > Mark L. Chang
>
> >>> > >>> > --
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> >>> > >>> > --
> >>> > >>> > Mark L. Chang
>
> >>> > >>> > --
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Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 4:42:54 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
We'll confirm Tuesday and set a time by Sunday evening. I hope that is not too late for you.
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>
> >>> > >>> > --
> >>> > >>> > Mark L. Chang
>
> >>> > >>> > --
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Marsh Sutherland
May 18, 2012, 4:56:23 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com, boston-r...@googlegroups.com
If its this Tuesday the 22nd I'm hosting a FounderMatchup BrewBash upstairs at Meadhall from 6-10 pm
Rubyists are welcome to come upstairs for free appetizers!
Startup pitches start at 7 pm so come upstairs and you might hear about a startup you can hack on and build your Ruby skills with for equity ;)
http://fmbrewbashmay2012.eventbrite.com/
Marsh Sutherland
(617) 999-9211
Rubyists are welcome to come upstairs for free appetizers!
Startup pitches start at 7 pm so come upstairs and you might hear about a startup you can hack on and build your Ruby skills with for equity ;)
http://fmbrewbashmay2012.eventbrite.com/
Marsh Sutherland
(617) 999-9211
Kevin Bedell
May 18, 2012, 5:13:34 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Dan and I are coordinating and will send a note out over the weekend
to confirm. I'd expect it to be either 6 or 7.
-kevin
>> >>>> > >>> >> boston-r...@googlegroups.com
to confirm. I'd expect it to be either 6 or 7.
-kevin
>> >>>> > >>> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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>> >>>> >
>> >>>> > >>> > --
>> >>>> > >>> > Mark L. Chang
>> >>>> >
>> >>>> > >>> > --
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>> >>>> > >>> > --
>> >>>> > >>> > Mark L. Chang
>> >>>> >
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>> >
>> > --
>> > Dylan Cashman
>> > Annkissam - Mission Driven Systems
>> > www.annkissam.com
>> >
>> > One Broadway, 14th Floor
>> > Cambridge, MA 02142
>> > Cell (preferred): 617-999-3634
>> > Office: 617-401-2480, ext. 708
>> > Fax: 617-507-5922
>> >
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>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Dylan Cashman
>> > Annkissam - Mission Driven Systems
>> > www.annkissam.com
>> >
>> > One Broadway, 14th Floor
>> > Cambridge, MA 02142
>> > Cell (preferred): 617-999-3634
>> > Office: 617-401-2480, ext. 708
>> > Fax: 617-507-5922
>> >
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>
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Michael Denomy
May 18, 2012, 5:37:43 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I'd like to help out too. Ruby novice but eager to help out however I can. Can certainly help with a new-comer's perspective.
Michael
Michael
Brice Stacey
May 18, 2012, 8:09:00 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
In the future I'd love to see this expand to all skill levels.
Mentorship shouldn't stop after you level up but it almost always
does.
Brice
—
Sent from my iPhone
Mentorship shouldn't stop after you level up but it almost always
does.
Brice
—
Sent from my iPhone
Daniel Choi
May 18, 2012, 8:21:44 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I think that even serving as a mentor is an awesome form of self-improvement. By figuring out how to communicate some intricate bit of knowledge to someone clearly, you massively sharpen and deepen it in yourself.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> boston-rubygroup@googlegroups.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> boston-rubygroup-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> For more options, visit this group at
>>>>>>>>>>>>>> http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>>>>>> Mark L. Chang
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>>>>>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the
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>>>>>>>>>>>>> Group mailing list
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>>>>>>>>>>>>> boston-rubygroup@googlegroups.com
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>>>>>>>>>>>>> boston-rubygroup-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>> For more options, visit this group at
>>>>>>>>>>>>> http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> --
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>>>>>>>>>> boston-rubygroup-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
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>>>>>>>>>> http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup
>>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Dylan Cashman
>>>>> Annkissam - Mission Driven Systems
>>>>> www.annkissam.com
>>>>>
>>>>> One Broadway, 14th Floor
>>>>> Cambridge, MA 02142
>>>>> Cell (preferred): 617-999-3634
>>>>> Office: 617-401-2480, ext. 708
>>>>> Fax: 617-507-5922
>>>>>
>>>>> --
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>>>
>>> --
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>
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Dan Croak
May 18, 2012, 9:10:47 PM5/18/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Dreyfus model has something in it about great time to mentor someone is right after you've learned it or have little, not a lot, difference in skill level.
Rebecca Frankel
May 19, 2012, 12:41:00 PM5/19/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
You know, I'd like to say that I've been in a lot of tech communities --- math and physics at MIT, math at Harvard, MIT's AI community, Google engineering, and the programming language research community --- and of all of them, the Ruby community is by far the most friendly and helpful. (With maybe only Google coming in a not-too-close second. Of course since I have the Harvard math department as a baseline there may be a dwarf- among-midgets effect going on; other people have had different reactions, but they also have a different objects of comparison.)
I agree with Brian that it is wisest to choose something reasonably sustainable. For instance, a while back there was a movie night --- watching screencasts with (fairly extensive) discussion afterwards. I really loved it, and whenever there has been talk of what to do on the fourth unfilled Tuesday I've said, um, remember movie night?
That wasn't explicitly educational, but I found the post-screencast discussion very illuminating, perhaps because, as I've said, often the most mysterious thing isn't the working of the technology but the context of what it is for and the judgement calls you make on how to use it. For instance, one of the movie night meetings covered Sinatra, which was new at the time, and the discussion afterwards gave me a lot of insight into why people were excited about this new thing and what they were planning on building with it.
Perhaps I liked movie night because another thing that is remarkable and interesting about the Ruby community (in comparison to other tech communities) is the ferment --- how quickly new ideas get considered, improved, adopted, and then superseded. For instance, the first hackfest I went to a group was developing Factory Girl, and less than a year later it was widely adopted and its authors were big heroes. That doesn't happen in programming language research --- if you are lucky you develop an idea over a decade and it gets adopted in another decade. (If you are very lucky!) Of course, the ferment has a downside, because it also means skills become obsolete very fast. Yes, I have experience setting up fixtures the old bad way, but who cares now that we have Factory Girl? Expertise spoils faster than two day old milk, which can result in the kind of despair that drove _why to internet suicide.
So in a world where expertise goes rancid so quickly, it seems like the real experts aren't the ones who know what's hot right now, they are the ones who know what will be hot tomorrow. For instance, someone mentioned on this list that they were switching from Sass to Stylus, and my first reaction was: my Sass knowledge is obsolete already! Omg, shoot me now! But then I looked at Stylus to see what made it worth the switch, read "lexically scoped" and laughed. Greenspun's tenth rule generalizes beyond C and Fortran even to CSS preprocessors! If one wants to learn more about Stylus, I think studying a curriculum is less interesting than answering the question: what does this make possible? Are there any "zero to hero" projects like Factory Girl that one could build that weren't possible without it? For instance, this article written by a designer talks about "comment math" and I wonder, why is the programming support so pathetic that the math has to be in a comment and not in a function? Is there a good way to fix this? If so, what would it take to get people to actually use it? Those are the sort of questions I might hope to get answers to from something like a movie night discussion.
Perhaps I'm a little bit down on curricula partly because they exist already, and partly also because it doesn't escape my notice that the girls get together to study topics, and the guys get together to do "zero to hero" projects, and, um, the guys' way works better. I'm afraid a study group is a Girls Ghetto one can never escape from, because there are always new topics to study. It never ends. I've had guys tell me I study too much --- I'm too worried about knowing everything before I start programming. At some point I have to trust that if I know more or less how to think about a "lexically scoped language with CSS-like syntax" I can lazily evaluate actually figuring out the exact syntax of something like Stylus, at the point when I need it, because I can't be studying every possible thing like that in advance. I suppose that only works if you know very well what "lexically scoped" and "CSS-like syntax" means and all its consequences --- that kind of curriculum does really matter. But after that I think it might be more helpful to have an explicitly inclusive group that helped people design and execute "zero to hero" type projects. And that wouldn't have to be just an education thing; it might help people "level up," as someone on this list said, or improve the profile of the Boston Ruby community in general.
Rebecca
On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com> wrote:
To post to this group, send email to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to boston-rubygro...@googlegroups.com
Daniel Choi
May 19, 2012, 2:13:38 PM5/19/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Hi Rebecca,
> Expertise spoils faster than two day old milk, which can result in the kind of despair that drove _why to internet suicide.
Not for everything. I think am going to be using cat, grep, find, less, ed, vi, ssh, telnet, curl, SQL, pipes, redirects, and other basic stuff for a very long time. That part of the skillset will surely last as long as honey.
> I'm too worried about knowing everything before I start programming.
> Expertise spoils faster than two day old milk, which can result in the kind of despair that drove _why to internet suicide.
Not for everything. I think am going to be using cat, grep, find, less, ed, vi, ssh, telnet, curl, SQL, pipes, redirects, and other basic stuff for a very long time. That part of the skillset will surely last as long as honey.
> I'm too worried about knowing everything before I start programming.
Whenever I have a thought like that, I look at sites like Craigslist or IMDB.com. Proof that you can build incredibly useful and popular software with tools that are total crap compared to the state of the art in Rubyworld. I think it's more important to start building useful stuff than to make sure that you start building it with the best possible CSS preprocessor.
Maurício Linhares
May 19, 2012, 10:49:41 PM5/19/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
On Saturday, May 19, 2012 at 1:41 PM, Rebecca Frankel wrote:
You know, I'd like to say that I've been in a lot of tech communities --- math and physics at MIT, math at Harvard, MIT's AI community, Google engineering, and the programming language research community --- and of all of them, the Ruby community is by far the most friendly and helpful. (With maybe only Google coming in a not-too-close second. Of course since I have the Harvard math department as a baseline there may be a dwarf- among-midgets effect going on; other people have had different reactions, but they also have a different objects of comparison.)I agree with Brian that it is wisest to choose something reasonably sustainable. For instance, a while back there was a movie night --- watching screencasts with (fairly extensive) discussion afterwards. I really loved it, and whenever there has been talk of what to do on the fourth unfilled Tuesday I've said, um, remember movie night?That wasn't explicitly educational, but I found the post-screencast discussion very illuminating, perhaps because, as I've said, often the most mysterious thing isn't the working of the technology but the context of what it is for and the judgement calls you make on how to use it. For instance, one of the movie night meetings covered Sinatra, which was new at the time, and the discussion afterwards gave me a lot of insight into why people were excited about this new thing and what they were planning on building with it.Perhaps I liked movie night because another thing that is remarkable and interesting about the Ruby community (in comparison to other tech communities) is the ferment --- how quickly new ideas get considered, improved, adopted, and then superseded. For instance, the first hackfest I went to a group was developing Factory Girl, and less than a year later it was widely adopted and its authors were big heroes. That doesn't happen in programming language research --- if you are lucky you develop an idea over a decade and it gets adopted in another decade. (If you are very lucky!) Of course, the ferment has a downside, because it also means skills become obsolete very fast. Yes, I have experience setting up fixtures the old bad way, but who cares now that we have Factory Girl? Expertise spoils faster than two day old milk, which can result in the kind of despair that drove _why to internet suicide.
Think about it, you already know what kind of problem you're trying to solve, get contextual data into the database so you can easily run your tests, with this you can either go down the usual path, use fixtures, not be happy about it, build something that fixes it (like FactoryGirl or Machinist) or just stay there and don't do anything. I think the main point here is, should I try to scratch my own itch or should I just leave it the way it is?
One thing that I find really amazing on the Ruby community is this "let's scratch the itch" kind of thinking. People look at a problem and they just don't wait for someone to bring a solution, coming from a Java background, where everyone expected Sun and the JCP to come forward with everything that should or should not be done, it was a HUGE blessing, since the movement itself is decentralized and it evolves naturally around solutions that work instead of stuff designed by a committee of people not involved in doing the job.
On a different note, I wouldn't call "learning how to use FactoryGirl" an expertise at all. Something that won't take you more than a couple of minutes to integrate in your tests isn't something that will cost you anything, but there definitely is a lot of expertise on the way FactoryGirl decided to solve the problem and this kind of knowledge goes on with you for a long time and will even be translated to different languages. If you end up writing Python software you might think, hey, what if there was something like FactoryGirl here to help me setup my db? Then you could just come up with the knowledge you have of how FactoryGirl solved the problem and try to build something like it in Python. So maybe you're looking at this specific thing from the wrong perspective, it's not on the tool itself, but how it affects your work and what you could possibly learn from it.
So in a world where expertise goes rancid so quickly, it seems like the real experts aren't the ones who know what's hot right now, they are the ones who know what will be hot tomorrow. For instance, someone mentioned on this list that they were switching from Sass to Stylus, and my first reaction was: my Sass knowledge is obsolete already! Omg, shoot me now! But then I looked at Stylus to see what made it worth the switch, read "lexically scoped" and laughed. Greenspun's tenth rule generalizes beyond C and Fortran even to CSS preprocessors! If one wants to learn more about Stylus, I think studying a curriculum is less interesting than answering the question: what does this make possible? Are there any "zero to hero" projects like Factory Girl that one could build that weren't possible without it? For instance, this article written by a designer talks about "comment math" and I wonder, why is the programming support so pathetic that the math has to be in a comment and not in a function? Is there a good way to fix this? If so, what would it take to get people to actually use it? Those are the sort of questions I might hope to get answers to from something like a movie night discussion.
We're surely on our way to Lisp (or maybe Haskell, who knows?). Every single language is moving in that direction, hahaha, we will eventually get there ;D
Perhaps I'm a little bit down on curricula partly because they exist already, and partly also because it doesn't escape my notice that the girls get together to study topics, and the guys get together to do "zero to hero" projects, and, um, the guys' way works better. I'm afraid a study group is a Girls Ghetto one can never escape from, because there are always new topics to study. It never ends. I've had guys tell me I study too much --- I'm too worried about knowing everything before I start programming. At some point I have to trust that if I know more or less how to think about a "lexically scoped language with CSS-like syntax" I can lazily evaluate actually figuring out the exact syntax of something like Stylus, at the point when I need it, because I can't be studying every possible thing like that in advance. I suppose that only works if you know very well what "lexically scoped" and "CSS-like syntax" means and all its consequences --- that kind of curriculum does really matter. But after that I think it might be more helpful to have an explicitly inclusive group that helped people design and execute "zero to hero" type projects. And that wouldn't have to be just an education thing; it might help people "level up," as someone on this list said, or improve the profile of the Boston Ruby community in general.
I think striking a balance here is what people should try to do. You shouldn't be just blindingly following a curriculum just for the sake of it without trying to apply it in real world stuff, but you also should not stop studying stuff that is out of your current comfort zone as these things are possibly the pieces that are going to give you those "bazinga!" moments where you figure out you could mix "lexically scoped" and "CSS-like syntax" and come up with Stylus. While deciding where the balance is isn't necessarily simple, it's something we should strive for so that we can make better decisions on the issues we're trying to solve, but we need to be working on real world problems, we need to be doing stuff for customers that need to make money out of the software (or stop spending money ;D).
Not easy, but no one ever said programming was easy, but it is a lot of fun.
Mitchell N Charity
May 20, 2012, 10:19:03 AM5/20/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
> [...] the Ruby community is by far the most friendly and helpful. [...]
Curiously, I find I've switched to recommending Boston Python more often
than Boston Ruby.
What's changed?
(1) Boston Python now has a large monthly project night. Large, as in
the size of a main monthly meeting. With a diverse population, from
folks doing scientific python, to handholding people getting python
installed. And there's a leadership commitment to outreach. So given,
say a retooling java dev, or a designer learning to code, I can point
them at project night, and anticipate that if they try to go, good
things will happen.
I can't do that anymore with Boston Ruby.
(2) The Boston Ruby group meetings have become harder to get into.
Registration required, and wait lists. That's new, post-Sermo. It
makes pointing people at the group meeting less useful.
What's changed there? I don't know. Larger group; struggling to find a
venue; fewer ties to academia and its large rooms; a meetup culture
shift, from "we maxed out" being an organization fail, to being
unremarkable; a bostonrb leadership culture shift (I had an organizer
say explicitly that making it easy for people to get to the meeting
wasn't something he cared about).
(3) Less to offer newbs at present. The extras like movie night wax and
wane, and we're currently waned (but waxing, yay:). The trend toward
high-end talks - which I like, but... perhaps it could be consistently
leavened with say a monthly newb-friendly lightning or mini-lightning talk.
The impact of (2) and (3) is the difference between my being able to say
"Come to the group meeting! You'll enjoy it! Skim the talks - some of
it will be accessible. And there's a movie night.", and having only
"Well, there's a group meeting... you can try to get in. And, err,
hmm. Well, there's lots of jobs..."
It's great to see the interest in mentoring/teaching... thanks for your
efforts.
Mitchell
Curiously, I find I've switched to recommending Boston Python more often
than Boston Ruby.
What's changed?
(1) Boston Python now has a large monthly project night. Large, as in
the size of a main monthly meeting. With a diverse population, from
folks doing scientific python, to handholding people getting python
installed. And there's a leadership commitment to outreach. So given,
say a retooling java dev, or a designer learning to code, I can point
them at project night, and anticipate that if they try to go, good
things will happen.
I can't do that anymore with Boston Ruby.
(2) The Boston Ruby group meetings have become harder to get into.
Registration required, and wait lists. That's new, post-Sermo. It
makes pointing people at the group meeting less useful.
What's changed there? I don't know. Larger group; struggling to find a
venue; fewer ties to academia and its large rooms; a meetup culture
shift, from "we maxed out" being an organization fail, to being
unremarkable; a bostonrb leadership culture shift (I had an organizer
say explicitly that making it easy for people to get to the meeting
wasn't something he cared about).
(3) Less to offer newbs at present. The extras like movie night wax and
wane, and we're currently waned (but waxing, yay:). The trend toward
high-end talks - which I like, but... perhaps it could be consistently
leavened with say a monthly newb-friendly lightning or mini-lightning talk.
The impact of (2) and (3) is the difference between my being able to say
"Come to the group meeting! You'll enjoy it! Skim the talks - some of
it will be accessible. And there's a movie night.", and having only
"Well, there's a group meeting... you can try to get in. And, err,
hmm. Well, there's lots of jobs..."
It's great to see the interest in mentoring/teaching... thanks for your
efforts.
Mitchell
Michael Denomy
May 20, 2012, 10:39:47 AM5/20/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
To paraphrase Yogi Berra
"Boston Ruby - Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded".
As a newb, I share some of Mitchell's concerns. I enjoy the talks and try to absorb what I can and usually find a lot of things to dig into after the fact, so that has been really positive. It will always be a challenge to find a space and format that can reach the variety of skill levels and geographic challenges of the larger community.
I am optimistic about all the interest in the mentoring program both as a mentor and a mentee. Following something like the Dreyfus model might help us put small groups together that are close in levels of experience and that can independently arrange their own meeting times and places. I know I could provide lessons learned and advice to someone just starting out and would greatly benefit from the guidance of an experienced (but not expert) RoR developer.
-Michael
"Boston Ruby - Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded".
As a newb, I share some of Mitchell's concerns. I enjoy the talks and try to absorb what I can and usually find a lot of things to dig into after the fact, so that has been really positive. It will always be a challenge to find a space and format that can reach the variety of skill levels and geographic challenges of the larger community.
I am optimistic about all the interest in the mentoring program both as a mentor and a mentee. Following something like the Dreyfus model might help us put small groups together that are close in levels of experience and that can independently arrange their own meeting times and places. I know I could provide lessons learned and advice to someone just starting out and would greatly benefit from the guidance of an experienced (but not expert) RoR developer.
-Michael
Daniel Choi
May 20, 2012, 12:58:33 PM5/20/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
This is solid constructive criticism. I'm reaching out to my Python friends to ask them for community service and mentorship advice.
Brian Cardarella
May 20, 2012, 2:03:58 PM5/20/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Mitchell,
I don't think (2) is particularly valid. There needs to be a limit on
the bodies we allow in. I post the announcements with plenty of time,
first come first serve.
The group is growing because I've intentionally stayed away from noob
presentations, as well as off-topic general technology presentations.
I've turned down a lot. It's staying this way.
- Brian
I don't think (2) is particularly valid. There needs to be a limit on
the bodies we allow in. I post the announcements with plenty of time,
first come first serve.
The group is growing because I've intentionally stayed away from noob
presentations, as well as off-topic general technology presentations.
I've turned down a lot. It's staying this way.
- Brian
Braulio Carreno
May 20, 2012, 2:18:05 PM5/20/12
to Boston Ruby Group
Regarding the venue: Boston Linux/Unix and other groups use MIT
classrooms, they're large and no registration is required. I checked
the MIT website and it seems the group has to be recognized by the
institution in order to request a classroom (https://asa.mit.edu/)
We have some MIT alumni in bostorb: Rebecca, Barun, others? do you
think you can help with this?
classrooms, they're large and no registration is required. I checked
the MIT website and it seems the group has to be recognized by the
institution in order to request a classroom (https://asa.mit.edu/)
We have some MIT alumni in bostorb: Rebecca, Barun, others? do you
think you can help with this?
Barun Singh
May 20, 2012, 2:45:01 PM5/20/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Responding to Braulio's suggestion:
I haven't thought much about the ASA since I rewrote it's constitution some years ago :)
Recognition by the ASA at MIT requires that at least 50% of the membership is MIT students, which doesn't seem to be a feasible (or desirable) option for this group.
If you wanted to pursue getting space at MIT (I'm neither advocating for nor against this), the best option would be to connect with an existing ASA-recognized student group that is interested in hosting events on behalf of BostonRB. There is an online database of all of these groups here: https://asa.mit.edu/groups/
-Barun
Brian Cardarella
May 20, 2012, 2:48:16 PM5/20/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
We have the registration in place to help determine how much pizza to buy
- Brian
Sent from my iPhone
- Brian
Sent from my iPhone
Brian Cardarella
May 20, 2012, 2:48:49 PM5/20/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
We're staying at Brightcove for the foreseeable future.
- Brian
Sent from my iPhone
Chad Pytel
May 21, 2012, 2:46:12 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
How is Python's project night practically different than Boston.rb's Hackfests?
Regardless of whether they are the same or not, there seems to be a recurring misconception/intimidation about new people showing up to the Hackfest, which I'm not sure how to overcome (but I'd like to). Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Perhaps we people were to explicitly state that they were available to help new people then we could make that as part of the pitch and can guarantee that someone will always be there to help?
As for the movie-night style things, thoughtbot has several screencasts/videos: http://workshops.thoughtbot.com.
We can "donate" a public showing of one or more of them, followed by discussion, etc. We could do this as part of the monthly whackiest at thoughtbot or as a separate event, if there is interest in that.
---
Chad Pytel, Founder and CEO
thoughtbot, inc.
t: 617-482-1300 x113
f: 866-217-5992
http://www.thoughtbot.com
http://www.twitter.com/thoughtbot
Regardless of whether they are the same or not, there seems to be a recurring misconception/intimidation about new people showing up to the Hackfest, which I'm not sure how to overcome (but I'd like to). Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Perhaps we people were to explicitly state that they were available to help new people then we could make that as part of the pitch and can guarantee that someone will always be there to help?
As for the movie-night style things, thoughtbot has several screencasts/videos: http://workshops.thoughtbot.com.
We can "donate" a public showing of one or more of them, followed by discussion, etc. We could do this as part of the monthly whackiest at thoughtbot or as a separate event, if there is interest in that.
Chad Pytel, Founder and CEO
thoughtbot, inc.
t: 617-482-1300 x113
f: 866-217-5992
http://www.thoughtbot.com
http://www.twitter.com/thoughtbot
Chris Rhoden
May 21, 2012, 2:53:50 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I think that the only difference that's explicitly called out by these discussions is that they specifically have mentors which won't be doing anything if newbies don't show up, and they advertise as such. So I think you hit the nail on the head, there. But I don't think that's even close to the whole issue.
They also advertise the general events more toward newbies, which, for better or worse, boston.rb in general is not targeted at nearly as much as the python group.
As much as I love the idea behind this, we need to seriously consider what we want. Boston Python is unlikely to be as useful to experienced pythonistas because of the focus on addressing the needs of newbies. It looks like what is starting to happen here is a fork of Boston.rb which is more focused on newbies so that we can have a group still focused on the needs of experienced rubyists. Is this actually what we want? I honestly don't know. I do know that it's going to be a ton of effort if that's the road we head down.
As much as I love the idea behind this, we need to seriously consider what we want. Boston Python is unlikely to be as useful to experienced pythonistas because of the focus on addressing the needs of newbies. It looks like what is starting to happen here is a fork of Boston.rb which is more focused on newbies so that we can have a group still focused on the needs of experienced rubyists. Is this actually what we want? I honestly don't know. I do know that it's going to be a ton of effort if that's the road we head down.
chrisrhoden
Daniel Choi
May 21, 2012, 2:55:09 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Regardless of whether they are the same or not, there seems to be a recurring misconception/intimidation about new people showing up to the Hackfest, which I'm not sure how to overcome (but I'd like to). Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Perhaps we people were to explicitly state that they were available to help new people then we could make that as part of the pitch and can guarantee that someone will always be there to help?
Boston Python does exactly this. They announce that there is a "beginner's corner" along with the advertisement, and make sure that there are Boston Python volunteers there in the beginner's corner to help beginners. They also have a bigger pipeline for beginners in general because of the Boston Python Workshops. You can see this system described in this PyCon video at 22:00.
http://pyvideo.org/video/719/diversity-in-practice-how-the-boston-python-user
http://pyvideo.org/video/719/diversity-in-practice-how-the-boston-python-user
Chad Pytel
May 21, 2012, 2:59:11 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Sorry, yes, I could have made it more clear that I was suggesting this from the Python stuff.
If we had people willing to volunteer for staffing the beginner's corner, then we could definitely make this more explicit. thoughtbot can help organize and keep track of the volunteers if there was interest.
If we had people willing to volunteer for staffing the beginner's corner, then we could definitely make this more explicit. thoughtbot can help organize and keep track of the volunteers if there was interest.
Joel Oliveira
May 21, 2012, 3:01:43 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Regarding the "beginner's corner" that Boston Python encourages - why
doesn't Boston.rb facilitate some sort of way to pair up beginners and
experienced programmers for hackfests? If a beginner could sit and
pair with someone that knows their way in and out of ruby I'd say
that's a win-win. I think hackfests have built-in opportunity for
those that want to mentor, and those that want to learn. Let's just
put them together.
If newcomers had a way of saying "I'm doing X and I'd love to learn
more about Y" then people can jump in on a first come first serve
basis.
Whether it happens this way or not I think that's how I'm going to
approach future hackfests.
- Joel
doesn't Boston.rb facilitate some sort of way to pair up beginners and
experienced programmers for hackfests? If a beginner could sit and
pair with someone that knows their way in and out of ruby I'd say
that's a win-win. I think hackfests have built-in opportunity for
those that want to mentor, and those that want to learn. Let's just
put them together.
If newcomers had a way of saying "I'm doing X and I'd love to learn
more about Y" then people can jump in on a first come first serve
basis.
Whether it happens this way or not I think that's how I'm going to
approach future hackfests.
- Joel
Daniel Choi
May 21, 2012, 3:27:04 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
On Monday, May 21, 2012 2:53:50 PM UTC-4, chrisrhoden wrote:
As much as I love the idea behind this, we need to seriously consider what we want. Boston Python is unlikely to be as useful to experienced pythonistas because of the focus on addressing the needs of newbies. It looks like what is starting to happen here is a fork of Boston.rb which is more focused on newbies so that we can have a group still focused on the needs of experienced rubyists. Is this actually what we want? I honestly don't know. I do know that it's going to be a ton of effort if that's the road we head down.
Yeah, it is going to be a lot of work. But the potential marginal impact is great. There is already a ton of resources, videos, blogs, courses, books, etc. for experienced and professional Rubyists. Even one less than advanced presentation per monthly BostonRB meeting isn't going to constitute a serious deprivation of the educational resources that an advanced Rubyist like you has at his/her disposal. But I don't think there is room for doubt the Ruby community falls very short in the diversity department, and could do a lot better in the what it offers beginners.
Kevin Bedell
May 21, 2012, 3:29:50 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Tomorrow we'll try to set some overall long-range goals for what we
want to do, as well as try to identify the people and resources we
have available to get there. I agree with Brian Cardarella's initial
comment that we want to make sure we don't bust of the gate and then
lose steam. I think initially we need to set goals and identify the
people that will get us there.
To that end, if there are specific people or organizations that are in
a position to contribute to the effort, this is the time to show up if
you can.
Chad -- offering up some of thoughtbot's resources to help out is
great and really appreciated. I hope you or Dan can make it tomorrow
so we can find a way to help you contribute in a meaningful way.
I think it would be good for us to set a worthwhile longer-term goal
for this effort and then begin coordinating resources around it. For
example, I think having a goal of having Boston recognized as having
the best program of this type in the country within two years is
something that's both doable and valuable for all of us.
We can talk more tomorrow.
6 PM THIS TUESDAY (TOMORROW)
Meadhall (restaurant / bar)
4 Cambridge Center
Cambridge MA 02142
want to do, as well as try to identify the people and resources we
have available to get there. I agree with Brian Cardarella's initial
comment that we want to make sure we don't bust of the gate and then
lose steam. I think initially we need to set goals and identify the
people that will get us there.
To that end, if there are specific people or organizations that are in
a position to contribute to the effort, this is the time to show up if
you can.
Chad -- offering up some of thoughtbot's resources to help out is
great and really appreciated. I hope you or Dan can make it tomorrow
so we can find a way to help you contribute in a meaningful way.
I think it would be good for us to set a worthwhile longer-term goal
for this effort and then begin coordinating resources around it. For
example, I think having a goal of having Boston recognized as having
the best program of this type in the country within two years is
something that's both doable and valuable for all of us.
We can talk more tomorrow.
6 PM THIS TUESDAY (TOMORROW)
Meadhall (restaurant / bar)
4 Cambridge Center
Cambridge MA 02142
Daniel Choi
May 21, 2012, 6:39:24 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
UPDATE:
Both Jessica McKellar (in person) and Asheesh Laroia (via teleconferencing) have agreed to attend the meeting tomorrow @ 6PM at PRX, 66 Church St, 2nd Floor, Harvard Square.
These are the two people who gave the PyCon presentation on Boston Python's diversity outreach effort.
Looking forward to seeing everyone,
Dan
Both Jessica McKellar (in person) and Asheesh Laroia (via teleconferencing) have agreed to attend the meeting tomorrow @ 6PM at PRX, 66 Church St, 2nd Floor, Harvard Square.
These are the two people who gave the PyCon presentation on Boston Python's diversity outreach effort.
Looking forward to seeing everyone,
Dan
Braulio Carreno
May 21, 2012, 6:52:36 PM5/21/12
to Boston Ruby Group
Excellent job Dan! I watched the video and it's amazing, definitely a
lot we can learn from Jessica a Asheesh.
lot we can learn from Jessica a Asheesh.
Daniel Choi
May 21, 2012, 6:58:46 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Thanks Braulio. We're lucky that they are this helpful and generous.
Daniel Choi
May 21, 2012, 11:05:52 PM5/21/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I had a productive email exchange with Jessica McKellar. I think her answers to some questions I posed to her over email are really very informative and can do a lot to set the agenda for the meeting tomorrow. Please read the conversation below:
----------------------------------------------
from: Jessica McKellar <jessica....@gmail.com>
date: Mon, May 21 10:18 PM -04:00 2012
to: Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com>
cc: Asheesh Laroia <ash...@asheesh.org>
subject: Re: Setting up Asheesh for the BostonRB outreach and mentoring meeting
Hi Daniel,
> - Should we focus on setting up a mentoring network for existing members
> of BostonRB,
In my experience, a) mentoring successfully is a lot of work, and b) most
people aren't good mentors. It's also a lot of work for impact on a
comparatively small number of people.
> or focus on easing the entry of beginners and women into
> the BostonRB community, which would entail much more intensive efforts
> like the Boston Python workshop? Is it unwise to try to do both? Can
> we start with one and then expand to the order, and in which order?
> Should we go big or go small and incremental?
>
I don't know much about the Boston Ruby community, but my general advice
for user groups is to start with an unstructured, beginner-friendly project
night like we do in Boston Python (see e.g.
http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/51175912/ for an example event
description). They are very easy to run. This is the document we start
beginners on at Boston Python project nights:
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_Python.
- How can we organize things so that we don't burn out? How do we keep
> people involved, and events happening?
>
I wouldn't worry about this too much until you've run an event or two.
Being good about producing open, reusable content makes re-running an event
easier (see e.g. https://openhatch.org/wiki/Boston_Python_Workshop_6).
> - Boston Python-like workshops seem very daunting to organize. Can we even
> hope to organize them?
Yes!
> How can we gauge our ability as a community to
> accomplish that?
>
Honestly, it takes a core of 1 or 2 motivated community members who will
see the first workshop through to the end no matter what. Once you've got a
workshop under your belt, they are not actually that much work to re-run.
Feedback from attendees, reflection, and iteration will ensure a good
product.
Regards,
-Jessica
----------------------------------------------
from: Jessica McKellar <jessica....@gmail.com>
date: Mon, May 21 10:18 PM -04:00 2012
to: Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com>
cc: Asheesh Laroia <ash...@asheesh.org>
subject: Re: Setting up Asheesh for the BostonRB outreach and mentoring meeting
Hi Daniel,
> - Should we focus on setting up a mentoring network for existing members
> of BostonRB,
In my experience, a) mentoring successfully is a lot of work, and b) most
people aren't good mentors. It's also a lot of work for impact on a
comparatively small number of people.
> or focus on easing the entry of beginners and women into
> the BostonRB community, which would entail much more intensive efforts
> like the Boston Python workshop? Is it unwise to try to do both? Can
> we start with one and then expand to the order, and in which order?
> Should we go big or go small and incremental?
>
I don't know much about the Boston Ruby community, but my general advice
for user groups is to start with an unstructured, beginner-friendly project
night like we do in Boston Python (see e.g.
http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/51175912/ for an example event
description). They are very easy to run. This is the document we start
beginners on at Boston Python project nights:
https://openhatch.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_Python.
- How can we organize things so that we don't burn out? How do we keep
> people involved, and events happening?
>
I wouldn't worry about this too much until you've run an event or two.
Being good about producing open, reusable content makes re-running an event
easier (see e.g. https://openhatch.org/wiki/Boston_Python_Workshop_6).
> - Boston Python-like workshops seem very daunting to organize. Can we even
> hope to organize them?
Yes!
> How can we gauge our ability as a community to
> accomplish that?
>
Honestly, it takes a core of 1 or 2 motivated community members who will
see the first workshop through to the end no matter what. Once you've got a
workshop under your belt, they are not actually that much work to re-run.
Feedback from attendees, reflection, and iteration will ensure a good
product.
Regards,
-Jessica
Patrick Robertson
May 22, 2012, 3:16:53 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I'm in Europe this week so I'll be unable to attend the meeting tonight. I've unfortunately not been in a position to reply at any point in the thread either. I thought I'd drop some thoughts.
The reason that we're able to have an audience of 100+ developers attend our meetings now are because we provide topical and intermediate-advanced talks on a consistent basis. We're able to secure large venues partly because we can get a fairly reliable sign-up list in advance. These are not common things for Ruby groups to be able to offer. Most are limited by how many experienced developers they have and many are also extremely limited by the venue size they can accomodate. I can assure you that other Ruby groups deal with wait lists and such as well; I wish this was something we could easily remedy.
I believe the community of experienced Ruby developers in Boston is fully capable of creating a solid mentorship program within the structure of the current group. I think some previous efforts have failed because of lack of focus in the mentorship program and also from lack of commitment from volunteers.
I believe that in order to be successful you should most certainly skip running mentorship via committee. One or two very interested leaders should just implement a workshop for a few months. Most of us work for startups in this community because we hate bureaucracy and committees; I'm not sure why we think they are great things to have while we volunteer our time :P. Think of it as a workshop startup. Offer one or two simple things. If the initial offering is successful then it is time to expand and enlist the help of a larger audience. If it isn't go ahead and pivot.
I'll be happy to volunteer some time to fix the boston.rb website to do whatever you think you need within reason to better foster the community of newer programmers. Similar to the paragraph above I would be most interested in meeting with the ringleaders to discuss what pains you the most with the current implementation. Web design is most certainly not a committee effort! That's the extent of time I can offer unfortunately; perhaps later in the year Iora can offer some space for meeting nights. I actually think outreach organizers and meeting organizers shouldn't be the same people so it works out well this way. Otherwise it is too large a time sink for one individual.
- Patrick
Daniel Choi
May 22, 2012, 7:49:46 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Thanks for your thoughts Patrick.
OK I've been thinking hard and talking to people about our outreach and mentoring options nearly all of yesterday. Here is how I see things now.
1. What Brian suggested in the original post is an easy win. It's a new part of the official bostonrb.org website dedicated to listing local mentoring and educational resources. One purpose of this meeting should be to get someone (or a pair) moving on that.
2. According to Jessica McKellar and Dan Croak (offline), both of whom have experience with this, actually running a mentoring program (as opposed to just listing resources and information) is hard and time-consuming, and depends a lot on the dedication, availability, and mentoring talent of individual mentors.
3. Running a project night (hack night) with an emphasis on or special care for beginners sounds like a good, feasible goal and a way to get the outreach ball rolling (while 1 or 2 people work on #1).
4. Running a 2-day women's workshop like the Boston Python Workshop could be something we can think about doing after doing a few successful project nights, if we get that far. It may sound hard to do, but in reality it requires 1 or 2 dedicated organizers and a beginner's web curriculum for the attendees to follow. In other words, it requires less in terms of time and resources than running a successful mentoring program.
5. If we pursue #3 and maybe #4, we need to start developing a web curriculum for beginners. For project night, it could be basic starting instructions for beginners. We should use the Boston Python's web resources as a model.
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Neil Cook
May 22, 2012, 8:57:02 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Liana Leahy did #4 a couple of years ago. The course went well. Perhaps she will relate the effort involved in making it happen.
It would be interesting (but probably difficult) to find out what happened to the women on that course. Particularly whether this was an effective springboard to a becoming a RoR developer. While it is great to make more people aware of this framework, most of us I suspect are keenest to deepen the pool of developers.
Cheers,
/Neil
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Chad Pytel
May 22, 2012, 9:14:02 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
thoughtbot has been trying to run this event again. I've already been talking with Liana to refine and duplicate the event. The biggest hurdle has been wanting to provide child care. Our training space is downtown and there don't seem to be child care options on the weekend. So we need to find another space with nearby childcare options that we can sponsor.
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Chris Rhoden
May 22, 2012, 9:19:21 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Neil Cook <n.k....@gmail.com> wrote:
While it is great to make more people aware of this framework, most of us I suspect are keenest to deepen the pool of developers.
I wouldn't say that bears much resemblance to my goals. I agree that many companies in the area would like to expand the talent pool, but that would be a bonus, in my mind.
My personal feeling is that Rails is just the way that we are most likely to attract people to learn Ruby. Many of the people learning Ruby will be learning programming for the first time (though, of course, not all).
While it's super useful that we have meetings to help people get better at advanced things, I would say that the benefit of having in-person time when you're just starting to show interest is significantly more powerful. It introduces you to the community, and provides you with a basic understanding of what the world of programming will be like in an environment where you can ask questions.
I have found that my ability to answer questions for myself has gotten much better as I have gotten better at working with Ruby. Frankly, the difference in terms of actionable knowledge between my attending an intermediate/advanced talk and watching a video of one is close to zero. Such meetings exist primarily as a social outlet. Contrast that with what a starting Rails developer could get from an introductory workshop vs. reading railstutorial.
While I think it would be nice if people decided that the thing that the learned how to do at a workshop is what they want to do for a living, ultimately, I see workshops (assuming that there are people who want to attend them) as ends in themselves.
chrisrhoden
John Norman
May 22, 2012, 9:20:21 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
The provision of childcare has been a part of a number of tech workshops and training programs. Examples:
And was called out by Jessica McKellar in a blog post:
She might have mentioned it in the Pycon pres., but I couldn't find it.
Chad Pytel
May 22, 2012, 9:25:30 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Yup, thats why we want to provide it. If anyone has any leads on a venue where this can be feasible, please email me personally.
Chad Pytel
May 22, 2012, 9:39:07 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
throughout the years there have been people who've run workshops for little or no charge for the Boston ruby community. It definitely just takes someone to step up and do it. There are existing curriculums that are publicly available, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel. One is http://curriculum.railsbridge.org/curriculum/. I believe Engine Yard has their material publicly available as well. So thats one option.
Another option is to embrace the organizations in Boston that are already doing Introductory workshops. We've been giving successful introductory workshops in Ruby on Rails for more than 4 years. General Assembly is going to be expanding to Boston and I'm sure they will be be providing some quality content on Ruby on Rails - perhaps at lower price points.
Perhaps Boston.rb can provide pointers to these things and we could provide discounts to the intro workshop for Boston.rb community members.
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Another option is to embrace the organizations in Boston that are already doing Introductory workshops. We've been giving successful introductory workshops in Ruby on Rails for more than 4 years. General Assembly is going to be expanding to Boston and I'm sure they will be be providing some quality content on Ruby on Rails - perhaps at lower price points.
Perhaps Boston.rb can provide pointers to these things and we could provide discounts to the intro workshop for Boston.rb community members.
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Daniel Choi
May 22, 2012, 9:39:28 AM5/22/12
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So is Thoughtbot intending to run this event under its own company name, or would you guys be open to making it a BostonRB event sponsored by Thoughtbot?
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Chad Pytel
May 22, 2012, 9:40:54 AM5/22/12
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The intention was that it would be a community event, we'd just be providing sponsorship, the trainer, and logistical support.
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Daniel Choi
May 22, 2012, 9:43:27 AM5/22/12
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I think that sounds great. If the event can involve BostonRB volunteers I think that will help inject and reinforce a positive outreach dynamic in BostonRB.
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Kevin Bedell
May 22, 2012, 9:52:45 AM5/22/12
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This sounds great -- thank you.
Let's get an overall plan together and we can get this on the schedule.
-k
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Let's get an overall plan together and we can get this on the schedule.
-k
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Chad Pytel
May 22, 2012, 9:55:33 AM5/22/12
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Kevin, without a venue or a reliable child care option (which is tied to finding a viable venue) we haven't bothered scheduling this yet, and I think that makes sense.
If anyone can help track down a suitable venue and child care that'd be a big help. Even just send me leads and we can follow up on them.
thanks,
-Chad
If anyone can help track down a suitable venue and child care that'd be a big help. Even just send me leads and we can follow up on them.
thanks,
-Chad
Chris Houhoulis
May 22, 2012, 10:02:48 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
If the venue supports it, providing childcare can be part of the
volunteer effort.
volunteer effort.
Chad Pytel
May 22, 2012, 10:04:45 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I'm not sure that thats strictly legal and wasn't sure the community could take on that liability. If anyone has more experience with that sort of thing, I'd love to hear it.
Chris Houhoulis
May 22, 2012, 11:35:16 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Dan, thanks for spearheading this effort & for your enthusiasm. I'm
glad we have a potential model, or at least some ideas to steal or
modify, from the Boston Python folks. Nice job reaching out to them
directly, too. And thx for the video; it's well worth the time.
Rebecca, really interesting counter-argument to beginner-track studying:
> Perhaps I'm a little bit down on curricula partly because they
> exist already, and partly also because it doesn't escape my
> notice that the girls get together to study topics, and the
> guys get together to do "zero to hero" projects, and, um, the
> guys' way works better. I'm afraid a study group is a Girls
> Ghetto one can never escape from, because there are always
> new topics to study.
Since I tend towards the careful and philosophical type of programmer
(http://techiferous.com/2011/08/are-you-a-good-programmer/), I spent a
_painfully_ long period of time learning on my own, trying to ramp up
and catch up to the cutting edge. So, what you said resonated for me as
a potential trap.
I do think beginners' workshops can involve a lot of people & get people
jump-started, which the Pythonistas stated were important. So the last
part of what you said also sounded good:
> But after that I think it might be more helpful to have an
> explicitly inclusive group that helped people design and
> execute "zero to hero" type projects. And that wouldn't have
> to be just an education thing; it might help people "level up,"
> as someone on this list said, or improve the profile of the
> Boston Ruby community in general.
Chris
On 5/19/12 12:41 PM, Rebecca Frankel wrote:
> You know, I'd like to say that I've been in a lot of tech communities
> --- math and physics at MIT, math at Harvard, MIT's AI community, Google
> engineering, and the programming language research community --- and of
> all of them, the Ruby community is by far the most friendly and helpful.
> (With maybe only Google coming in a not-too-close second. Of course
> since I have the Harvard math department as a baseline there may be a
> dwarf- among-midgets effect going on; other people have had different
> reactions, but they also have a different objects of comparison.)
>
> I agree with Brian that it is wisest to choose something reasonably
> sustainable. For instance, a while back there was a movie night ---
> watching screencasts with (fairly extensive) discussion afterwards. I
> really loved it, and whenever there has been talk of what to do on the
> fourth unfilled Tuesday I've said, um, remember movie night?
> That wasn't explicitly educational, but I found the post-screencast
> discussion very illuminating, perhaps because, as I've said, often the
> most mysterious thing isn't the working of the technology but the
> context of what it is for and the judgement calls you make on how to use
> it. For instance, one of the movie night meetings covered Sinatra, which
> was new at the time, and the discussion afterwards gave me a lot of
> insight into why people were excited about this new thing and what they
> were planning on building with it.
>
> Perhaps I liked movie night because another thing that is remarkable and
> interesting about the Ruby community (in comparison to other tech
> communities) is the ferment --- how quickly new ideas get considered,
> improved, adopted, and then superseded. For instance, the first hackfest
> I went to a group was developing Factory Girl, and less than a year
> later it was widely adopted and its authors were big heroes. That
> doesn't happen in programming language research --- if you are lucky you
> develop an idea over a decade and it gets adopted in another decade. (If
> you are very lucky!) Of course, the ferment has a downside, because it
> also means skills become obsolete very fast. Yes, I have experience
> setting up fixtures the old bad way, but who cares now that we have
> Factory Girl? Expertise spoils faster than two day old milk, which can
> result in the kind of despair that drove _why to internet suicide.
>
> So in a world where expertise goes rancid so quickly, it seems like the
> real experts aren't the ones who know what's hot right now, they are the
> ones who know what will be hot tomorrow. For instance, someone mentioned
> on this list that they were switching from Sass to Stylus, and my first
> reaction was: my Sass knowledge is obsolete /already/! Omg, shoot me
> now! But then I looked at Stylus to see what made it worth the switch,
> read "lexically scoped" and laughed. Greenspun's tenth rule
> <http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000tgU> generalizes
> beyond C and Fortran even to CSS preprocessors! If one wants to learn
> more about Stylus, I think studying a curriculum is less interesting
> than answering the question: what does this make possible? Are there any
> "zero to hero" projects like Factory Girl that one could build that
> weren't possible without it? For instance, this article written by a
> designer
> <http://www.alistapart.com/articles/more-meaningful-typography/> talks
> about "comment math" and I wonder, why is the programming support so
> pathetic that the math has to be in a comment and not in a function? Is
> there a good way to fix this? If so, what would it take to get people to
> actually use it? Those are the sort of questions I might hope to get
> answers to from something like a movie night discussion.
>
> Perhaps I'm a little bit down on curricula partly because they exist
> already, and partly also because it doesn't escape my notice that the
> girls get together to study topics, and the guys get together to do
> "zero to hero" projects, and, um, the guys' way works better. I'm afraid
> a study group is a Girls Ghetto one can never escape from, because there
> are /always/ new topics to study. It never ends. I've had guys tell me I
> study too much --- I'm too worried about knowing everything before I
> start programming. At some point I have to trust that if I know more or
> less how to think about a "lexically scoped language with CSS-like
> syntax" I can lazily evaluate actually figuring out the exact syntax of
> something like Stylus, at the point when I need it, because I can't be
> studying every possible thing like that in advance. I suppose that only
> works if you know very well what "lexically scoped" and "CSS-like
> syntax" means and all its consequences --- that kind of curriculum
> /does/ really matter. But after that I think it might be more helpful to
> have an explicitly inclusive group that helped people design and execute
> "zero to hero" type projects. And that wouldn't have to be just an
> education thing; it might help people "level up," as someone on this
> list said, or improve the profile of the Boston Ruby community in general.
>
> Rebecca
>
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com
> <mailto:dhc...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
> Your advice sounds pretty wise to me Brian.
>
> Kevin, would you mind opening up the meeting next week to whoever is
> interested?
>
> Maybe we can pick a cafe in Kendall Sq. (I assume that's the most
> neutral location) and a time.
>
>
> On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:15:16 PM UTC-4, Daniel Choi wrote:
>
>
> OK I can meet next week.
>
> On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:12:54 PM UTC-4, Kevin Bedell wrote:
>
> This sounds good.
>
> I was thinking that maybe Dan and I could meet next week(or
> when we're
> both available) to get a sense for what we might be able to do.
> Obviously, we'd coordinate back through the list to get
> agreement.
>
> Brian, Dan - what do you guys think?
>
> -Kevin
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Mark Chang
> <mark....@gmail.com <mailto:mark....@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > I like this attitude toward progressing and keeping the
> passion flame lit
> > :).
> > I'll toss my hat in the ring and offer to help out where
> there is need. I
> > don't want to lead, though.
> >
> > My expertise is mostly in curriculum development, but I
> will volunteer for
> > whatever I can if there is an open call for help.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
> > On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Brian Cardarella
> <bcard...@gmail.com <mailto:bcard...@gmail.com>>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm breaking this off into another thread.
> >>
> >> I think there needs to be a plan rather than just "do
> all of the things!"
> >>
> >> My approach is to start small and build on what is
> working. IMO, the
> >> first steps should be to add resources for learning to
> BostonRB.org.
> >> This should probably include a listing of companies that
> are offering
> >> mentor programs, workshops, suggested reading material,
> screen casts,
> >> and individual local mentors.
> >>
> >> After that is up and running we can have the discussion
> on what the
> >> next steps should be.
> >>
> >> I'm weary of people committing to teaching classes and
> running
> >> workshops under "BostonRB". I feel everyone has the best
> of intentions
> >> but the reality is the responsibility is time consuming.
> I don't want
> >> people to come running out of the gate and lose steam
> quickly. So
> >> let's take is slow.
> >>
> >> - Brian
> <mailto:boston-r...@googlegroups.com>
> <mailto:boston-rubygro...@googlegroups.com>
> <http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Mark L. Chang
> <mailto:boston-r...@googlegroups.com>
> <mailto:boston-rubygro...@googlegroups.com>
> <mailto:boston-rubygro...@googlegroups.com>
glad we have a potential model, or at least some ideas to steal or
modify, from the Boston Python folks. Nice job reaching out to them
directly, too. And thx for the video; it's well worth the time.
Rebecca, really interesting counter-argument to beginner-track studying:
> Perhaps I'm a little bit down on curricula partly because they
> exist already, and partly also because it doesn't escape my
> notice that the girls get together to study topics, and the
> guys get together to do "zero to hero" projects, and, um, the
> guys' way works better. I'm afraid a study group is a Girls
> Ghetto one can never escape from, because there are always
> new topics to study.
Since I tend towards the careful and philosophical type of programmer
(http://techiferous.com/2011/08/are-you-a-good-programmer/), I spent a
_painfully_ long period of time learning on my own, trying to ramp up
and catch up to the cutting edge. So, what you said resonated for me as
a potential trap.
I do think beginners' workshops can involve a lot of people & get people
jump-started, which the Pythonistas stated were important. So the last
part of what you said also sounded good:
> But after that I think it might be more helpful to have an
> explicitly inclusive group that helped people design and
> execute "zero to hero" type projects. And that wouldn't have
> to be just an education thing; it might help people "level up,"
> as someone on this list said, or improve the profile of the
> Boston Ruby community in general.
Chris
On 5/19/12 12:41 PM, Rebecca Frankel wrote:
> You know, I'd like to say that I've been in a lot of tech communities
> --- math and physics at MIT, math at Harvard, MIT's AI community, Google
> engineering, and the programming language research community --- and of
> all of them, the Ruby community is by far the most friendly and helpful.
> (With maybe only Google coming in a not-too-close second. Of course
> since I have the Harvard math department as a baseline there may be a
> dwarf- among-midgets effect going on; other people have had different
> reactions, but they also have a different objects of comparison.)
>
> I agree with Brian that it is wisest to choose something reasonably
> sustainable. For instance, a while back there was a movie night ---
> watching screencasts with (fairly extensive) discussion afterwards. I
> really loved it, and whenever there has been talk of what to do on the
> fourth unfilled Tuesday I've said, um, remember movie night?
> That wasn't explicitly educational, but I found the post-screencast
> discussion very illuminating, perhaps because, as I've said, often the
> most mysterious thing isn't the working of the technology but the
> context of what it is for and the judgement calls you make on how to use
> it. For instance, one of the movie night meetings covered Sinatra, which
> was new at the time, and the discussion afterwards gave me a lot of
> insight into why people were excited about this new thing and what they
> were planning on building with it.
>
> Perhaps I liked movie night because another thing that is remarkable and
> interesting about the Ruby community (in comparison to other tech
> communities) is the ferment --- how quickly new ideas get considered,
> improved, adopted, and then superseded. For instance, the first hackfest
> I went to a group was developing Factory Girl, and less than a year
> later it was widely adopted and its authors were big heroes. That
> doesn't happen in programming language research --- if you are lucky you
> develop an idea over a decade and it gets adopted in another decade. (If
> you are very lucky!) Of course, the ferment has a downside, because it
> also means skills become obsolete very fast. Yes, I have experience
> setting up fixtures the old bad way, but who cares now that we have
> Factory Girl? Expertise spoils faster than two day old milk, which can
> result in the kind of despair that drove _why to internet suicide.
>
> So in a world where expertise goes rancid so quickly, it seems like the
> real experts aren't the ones who know what's hot right now, they are the
> ones who know what will be hot tomorrow. For instance, someone mentioned
> on this list that they were switching from Sass to Stylus, and my first
> reaction was: my Sass knowledge is obsolete /already/! Omg, shoot me
> now! But then I looked at Stylus to see what made it worth the switch,
> read "lexically scoped" and laughed. Greenspun's tenth rule
> <http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000tgU> generalizes
> beyond C and Fortran even to CSS preprocessors! If one wants to learn
> more about Stylus, I think studying a curriculum is less interesting
> than answering the question: what does this make possible? Are there any
> "zero to hero" projects like Factory Girl that one could build that
> weren't possible without it? For instance, this article written by a
> designer
> <http://www.alistapart.com/articles/more-meaningful-typography/> talks
> about "comment math" and I wonder, why is the programming support so
> pathetic that the math has to be in a comment and not in a function? Is
> there a good way to fix this? If so, what would it take to get people to
> actually use it? Those are the sort of questions I might hope to get
> answers to from something like a movie night discussion.
>
> Perhaps I'm a little bit down on curricula partly because they exist
> already, and partly also because it doesn't escape my notice that the
> girls get together to study topics, and the guys get together to do
> "zero to hero" projects, and, um, the guys' way works better. I'm afraid
> a study group is a Girls Ghetto one can never escape from, because there
> are /always/ new topics to study. It never ends. I've had guys tell me I
> study too much --- I'm too worried about knowing everything before I
> start programming. At some point I have to trust that if I know more or
> less how to think about a "lexically scoped language with CSS-like
> syntax" I can lazily evaluate actually figuring out the exact syntax of
> something like Stylus, at the point when I need it, because I can't be
> studying every possible thing like that in advance. I suppose that only
> works if you know very well what "lexically scoped" and "CSS-like
> syntax" means and all its consequences --- that kind of curriculum
> /does/ really matter. But after that I think it might be more helpful to
> have an explicitly inclusive group that helped people design and execute
> "zero to hero" type projects. And that wouldn't have to be just an
> education thing; it might help people "level up," as someone on this
> list said, or improve the profile of the Boston Ruby community in general.
>
> Rebecca
>
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Daniel Choi <dhc...@gmail.com
> <mailto:dhc...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
> Your advice sounds pretty wise to me Brian.
>
> Kevin, would you mind opening up the meeting next week to whoever is
> interested?
>
> Maybe we can pick a cafe in Kendall Sq. (I assume that's the most
> neutral location) and a time.
>
>
> On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:15:16 PM UTC-4, Daniel Choi wrote:
>
>
> OK I can meet next week.
>
> On Friday, May 18, 2012 2:12:54 PM UTC-4, Kevin Bedell wrote:
>
> This sounds good.
>
> I was thinking that maybe Dan and I could meet next week(or
> when we're
> both available) to get a sense for what we might be able to do.
> Obviously, we'd coordinate back through the list to get
> agreement.
>
> Brian, Dan - what do you guys think?
>
> -Kevin
>
> On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Mark Chang
> <mark....@gmail.com <mailto:mark....@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > I like this attitude toward progressing and keeping the
> passion flame lit
> > :).
> > I'll toss my hat in the ring and offer to help out where
> there is need. I
> > don't want to lead, though.
> >
> > My expertise is mostly in curriculum development, but I
> will volunteer for
> > whatever I can if there is an open call for help.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
> > On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Brian Cardarella
> <bcard...@gmail.com <mailto:bcard...@gmail.com>>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm breaking this off into another thread.
> >>
> >> I think there needs to be a plan rather than just "do
> all of the things!"
> >>
> >> My approach is to start small and build on what is
> working. IMO, the
> >> first steps should be to add resources for learning to
> BostonRB.org.
> >> This should probably include a listing of companies that
> are offering
> >> mentor programs, workshops, suggested reading material,
> screen casts,
> >> and individual local mentors.
> >>
> >> After that is up and running we can have the discussion
> on what the
> >> next steps should be.
> >>
> >> I'm weary of people committing to teaching classes and
> running
> >> workshops under "BostonRB". I feel everyone has the best
> of intentions
> >> but the reality is the responsibility is time consuming.
> I don't want
> >> people to come running out of the gate and lose steam
> quickly. So
> >> let's take is slow.
> >>
> >> - Brian
> >>
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to
> the Boston Ruby
> >> Group mailing list
> >> To post to this group, send email to
> boston-rubygroup@googlegroups. com
> >> --
> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to
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> >> Group mailing list
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> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
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> <mailto:boston-rubygro...@googlegroups.com>
> <http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Mark L. Chang
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to
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>
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Daniel Choi
May 22, 2012, 11:50:51 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Being a spearhead is trickier and tougher than I thought! But it's helping me build skills I never thought of cultivating before. And I believe in what Kevin and I are doing. Thanks for for your support and encouragement.
> <mailto:boston-rubygroup@googlegroups.com>
> >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> >> boston-rubygroup-unsubscribe@ googlegroups.com
> <mailto:boston-rubygroup-unsub...@googlegroups.com>
> >> For more options, visit this group at
> >> http://groups.google.com/ group/boston-rubygroup
> <http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Mark L. Chang
> >
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to
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> > Group mailing list
> > To post to this group, send email to
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> <mailto:boston-rubygroup@googlegroups.com>
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> <mailto:boston-rubygroup-unsub...@googlegroups.com>
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > http://groups.google.com/ group/boston-rubygroup
> <http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup>
>
> --
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Chris Houhoulis
May 22, 2012, 11:59:00 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Very good point, sorry, I didn't think of the legal issues. I don't
know if I have the right contacts to learn about this, but I'll ask around.
know if I have the right contacts to learn about this, but I'll ask around.
Chris Houhoulis
May 22, 2012, 12:11:49 PM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
I think one factor in all this is that we don't all have identical goals.
It's important to me that we have high-quality presentations at our big
meetings -- and we post the videos online. I think that helps us, and
Boston, become known as a skilled and significant Ruby community.
I like getting to know people at our meetings & at the bar, and that's
been helpful professionally as well.
But for me personally, increasing the size of the 'pool of developers'
with lively and inclusive activities, and increasing the diversity and
skill of Rubyists via outreach and teaching/mentoring/etc, is more
important.
I feel very uncomfortable with our lack of diversity, and I don't like
the sense that our activities reinforce that.
I also spent a long time (years) in boston.rb as an 'advanced beginner',
struggling to gain enough experience to be a good job candidate. I'm
sensitive to the fact that we could be doing more to help people make
that important jump.
So I agree with Dan & others that the lack of diversity is worth the
effort of addressing. I think it reflects poorly on us, and I would
guess it has a negative effect, long-term, on the growth of our
professional niche.
I was part of our "Members Helping Members" efforts a while back. It
focused not just on helping newbs, but also increasing
information-sharing -- learning who could be available to mentor,
mentee, or co-work on particular technologies.
Hopefully, with a sharper focus now, and a proven success model to look
toward, people excited to work on this can get something going right
away. (I think the "Members Helping Members" effort petered out after
splitting up into subcommittees.)
Chris
On 5/20/12 2:03 PM, Brian Cardarella wrote:
> Mitchell,
>
> I don't think (2) is particularly valid. There needs to be a limit on
> the bodies we allow in. I post the announcements with plenty of time,
> first come first serve.
>
> The group is growing because I've intentionally stayed away from noob
> presentations, as well as off-topic general technology presentations.
> I've turned down a lot. It's staying this way.
>
> - Brian
>
> On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Daniel Choi<dhc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is solid constructive criticism. I'm reaching out to my Python friends
>> to ask them for community service and mentorship advice.
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, May 20, 2012 10:19:03 AM UTC-4, Mitchell N Charity wrote:
>>>
>>>> [...] the Ruby community is by far the most friendly and helpful. [...]
>>>
>>> Curiously, I find I've switched to recommending Boston Python more often
>>> than Boston Ruby.
>>>
>>> What's changed?
>>>
>>> (1) Boston Python now has a large monthly project night. Large, as in
>>> the size of a main monthly meeting. With a diverse population, from
>>> folks doing scientific python, to handholding people getting python
>>> installed. And there's a leadership commitment to outreach. So given,
>>> say a retooling java dev, or a designer learning to code, I can point
>>> them at project night, and anticipate that if they try to go, good
>>> things will happen.
>>>
>>> I can't do that anymore with Boston Ruby.
>>>
>>> (2) The Boston Ruby group meetings have become harder to get into.
>>> Registration required, and wait lists. That's new, post-Sermo. It
>>> makes pointing people at the group meeting less useful.
>>>
>>> What's changed there? I don't know. Larger group; struggling to find a
>>> venue; fewer ties to academia and its large rooms; a meetup culture
>>> shift, from "we maxed out" being an organization fail, to being
>>> unremarkable; a bostonrb leadership culture shift (I had an organizer
>>> say explicitly that making it easy for people to get to the meeting
>>> wasn't something he cared about).
>>>
>>> (3) Less to offer newbs at present. The extras like movie night wax and
>>> wane, and we're currently waned (but waxing, yay:). The trend toward
>>> high-end talks - which I like, but... perhaps it could be consistently
>>> leavened with say a monthly newb-friendly lightning or mini-lightning
>>> talk.
>>>
>>> The impact of (2) and (3) is the difference between my being able to say
>>> "Come to the group meeting! You'll enjoy it! Skim the talks - some of
>>> it will be accessible. And there's a movie night.", and having only
>>> "Well, there's a group meeting... you can try to get in. And, err,
>>> hmm. Well, there's lots of jobs..."
>>>
>>> It's great to see the interest in mentoring/teaching... thanks for your
>>> efforts.
>>> Mitchell
It's important to me that we have high-quality presentations at our big
meetings -- and we post the videos online. I think that helps us, and
Boston, become known as a skilled and significant Ruby community.
I like getting to know people at our meetings & at the bar, and that's
been helpful professionally as well.
But for me personally, increasing the size of the 'pool of developers'
with lively and inclusive activities, and increasing the diversity and
skill of Rubyists via outreach and teaching/mentoring/etc, is more
important.
I feel very uncomfortable with our lack of diversity, and I don't like
the sense that our activities reinforce that.
I also spent a long time (years) in boston.rb as an 'advanced beginner',
struggling to gain enough experience to be a good job candidate. I'm
sensitive to the fact that we could be doing more to help people make
that important jump.
So I agree with Dan & others that the lack of diversity is worth the
effort of addressing. I think it reflects poorly on us, and I would
guess it has a negative effect, long-term, on the growth of our
professional niche.
I was part of our "Members Helping Members" efforts a while back. It
focused not just on helping newbs, but also increasing
information-sharing -- learning who could be available to mentor,
mentee, or co-work on particular technologies.
Hopefully, with a sharper focus now, and a proven success model to look
toward, people excited to work on this can get something going right
away. (I think the "Members Helping Members" effort petered out after
splitting up into subcommittees.)
Chris
On 5/20/12 2:03 PM, Brian Cardarella wrote:
> Mitchell,
>
> I don't think (2) is particularly valid. There needs to be a limit on
> the bodies we allow in. I post the announcements with plenty of time,
> first come first serve.
>
> The group is growing because I've intentionally stayed away from noob
> presentations, as well as off-topic general technology presentations.
> I've turned down a lot. It's staying this way.
>
> - Brian
>
> On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Daniel Choi<dhc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is solid constructive criticism. I'm reaching out to my Python friends
>> to ask them for community service and mentorship advice.
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, May 20, 2012 10:19:03 AM UTC-4, Mitchell N Charity wrote:
>>>
>>>> [...] the Ruby community is by far the most friendly and helpful. [...]
>>>
>>> Curiously, I find I've switched to recommending Boston Python more often
>>> than Boston Ruby.
>>>
>>> What's changed?
>>>
>>> (1) Boston Python now has a large monthly project night. Large, as in
>>> the size of a main monthly meeting. With a diverse population, from
>>> folks doing scientific python, to handholding people getting python
>>> installed. And there's a leadership commitment to outreach. So given,
>>> say a retooling java dev, or a designer learning to code, I can point
>>> them at project night, and anticipate that if they try to go, good
>>> things will happen.
>>>
>>> I can't do that anymore with Boston Ruby.
>>>
>>> (2) The Boston Ruby group meetings have become harder to get into.
>>> Registration required, and wait lists. That's new, post-Sermo. It
>>> makes pointing people at the group meeting less useful.
>>>
>>> What's changed there? I don't know. Larger group; struggling to find a
>>> venue; fewer ties to academia and its large rooms; a meetup culture
>>> shift, from "we maxed out" being an organization fail, to being
>>> unremarkable; a bostonrb leadership culture shift (I had an organizer
>>> say explicitly that making it easy for people to get to the meeting
>>> wasn't something he cared about).
>>>
>>> (3) Less to offer newbs at present. The extras like movie night wax and
>>> wane, and we're currently waned (but waxing, yay:). The trend toward
>>> high-end talks - which I like, but... perhaps it could be consistently
>>> leavened with say a monthly newb-friendly lightning or mini-lightning
>>> talk.
>>>
>>> The impact of (2) and (3) is the difference between my being able to say
>>> "Come to the group meeting! You'll enjoy it! Skim the talks - some of
>>> it will be accessible. And there's a movie night.", and having only
>>> "Well, there's a group meeting... you can try to get in. And, err,
>>> hmm. Well, there's lots of jobs..."
>>>
>>> It's great to see the interest in mentoring/teaching... thanks for your
>>> efforts.
>>> Mitchell
Rebecca Frankel
May 22, 2012, 3:44:13 PM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Since that statement was a little inflammatory, I should point out that I included a caveat further down --- that "lexical scope" and "css style" was something worth being taught. I don't want to be understood to say that I don't think there are fundamental ideas that real beginners do need to actively study and be taught by experts. My comments are colored by the fact that I'm not a true beginner --- even before I learned any Ruby I had a lot of experience programming in different idioms.
In that vein, I had a nascent project I'd be curious if anyone else was interested in: a while back I bought the domain name "functionalmodularity.com" with the idea I might populate it with essays focused on the subject of various ways that popular semi-functional languages like Ruby or Javascript handle encapsulation of state. (The idea was that "functional" would be a pun, meaning both the academic idea and the colloquial idea of "practical, workable in the real world.") One of the central things that makes Ruby powerful but also, perhaps, deeply confusing to a beginner is that Matz, with his Japanese respect for tradition, put in Ruby homage both to the Smalltalk object-oriented tradition and the Lisp "closure-oriented" way of life. The result is that you can choose to program in either idiom, or mix them if you want to. The mixtures are where the real hazards to beginners lie. For instance, in Javascript, which has a similar but less elegant mixed heritage, closures and object-oriented "this" mix together, often with particularly mind-bending results; if I wasn't somewhat experienced I would run screaming from code like this. It is problems like these that makes it unfair to throw a beginner in the deep end without preparation.
The idea is that if I tried to imagine what would happen if a complete novice programmer got the idea that "Real Men Don't Read The Manual" and tried to learn modern web programming by diving into some sample code, wallowing around, and consulting references only when really confused, where would he or she get into hopeless trouble? Quite a bit of it could be learned this way (maybe the hash argument syntax in Ruby would be confusing for a while, but a judicious rescue dip into the manual would probably clear it up). The place I would imagine that a beginner could get hopelessly tied in knots is if he or she encountered code that, perhaps only implicitly, followed some idiom for the management of state, like an object oriented design pattern, and then maybe through blind cut and paste, mixed it together with a different idiom, and then tried to debug the result. Especially if code which used closures in a non-trivial way crept in, and the beginner didn't understand how functions can carry state, he or she could get completely confused. Though I like functional programming a lot, I can see how it can be very mysterious to a beginners -- it took me years to understand where the balance was being held in the simple bank account example in SICP. Nor would rescue forays into the manual necessarily help untangle such knots, because they depend on recognizing idioms and intuiting what the designer of the code was trying to accomplish with them. IMHO, this is the area in which someone with education or experience has a huge advantage over a total novice, and where formal education could turbocharge a beginner's self-confidence.
Perhaps this impulse came from the feeling that introductory programming is taught in ways that are so informed by extreme philosophies that there is a gap in the middle-ground. That is to say, universities tend to insist on teaching fundamentals, while companies equally adamantly insist on teaching practical knowledge, so it is hard to find something that highlights "the fundamental in the context of the practical" even though that may be what people need most. "Practical" knowledge is mostly both too easy to learn, and yet becomes irrelevant too quickly to be worth taking too much time to study, but "fundamental" knowledge can be hard to relate to practice when taught out of context. And the people who teach fundamentals usually prefer to teach either object-oriented styles or functional ones, both ignoring that the in the real world they mix, and sometimes the hairiest conundrums (like Javascript's "this") come from their interaction. So I felt there was a missing piece in the middle ground between these different educational philosophies. But, as I said, this was a nascent project, merely a conception. I wonder if anyone else thinks there is this gap and whether it is worth the effort to fill?
thanks for reading my long posts,
Rebecca
<mailto:boston-rubygroup@googlegroups.com>
>> For more options, visit this group at
>> http://groups.google.com/ group/boston-rubygroup
<http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark L. Chang
>
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Maurício Linhares
May 22, 2012, 4:16:20 PM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
On Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Rebecca Frankel wrote:
Since that statement was a little inflammatory, I should point out that I included a caveat further down --- that "lexical scope" and "css style" was something worth being taught. I don't want to be understood to say that I don't think there are fundamental ideas that real beginners do need to actively study and be taught by experts. My comments are colored by the fact that I'm not a true beginner --- even before I learned any Ruby I had a lot of experience programming in different idioms.In that vein, I had a nascent project I'd be curious if anyone else was interested in: a while back I bought the domain name "functionalmodularity.com" with the idea I might populate it with essays focused on the subject of various ways that popular semi-functional languages like Ruby or Javascript handle encapsulation of state. (The idea was that "functional" would be a pun, meaning both the academic idea and the colloquial idea of "practical, workable in the real world.") One of the central things that makes Ruby powerful but also, perhaps, deeply confusing to a beginner is that Matz, with his Japanese respect for tradition, put in Ruby homage both to the Smalltalk object-oriented tradition and the Lisp "closure-oriented" way of life. The result is that you can choose to program in either idiom, or mix them if you want to. The mixtures are where the real hazards to beginners lie. For instance, in Javascript, which has a similar but less elegant mixed heritage, closures and object-oriented "this" mix together, often with particularly mind-bending results; if I wasn't somewhat experienced I would run screaming from code like this. It is problems like these that makes it unfair to throw a beginner in the deep end without preparation.The idea is that if I tried to imagine what would happen if a complete novice programmer got the idea that "Real Men Don't Read The Manual" and tried to learn modern web programming by diving into some sample code, wallowing around, and consulting references only when really confused, where would he or she get into hopeless trouble? Quite a bit of it could be learned this way (maybe the hash argument syntax in Ruby would be confusing for a while, but a judicious rescue dip into the manual would probably clear it up). The place I would imagine that a beginner could get hopelessly tied in knots is if he or she encountered code that, perhaps only implicitly, followed some idiom for the management of state, like an object oriented design pattern, and then maybe through blind cut and paste, mixed it together with a different idiom, and then tried to debug the result. Especially if code which used closures in a non-trivial way crept in, and the beginner didn't understand how functions can carry state, he or she could get completely confused. Though I like functional programming a lot, I can see how it can be very mysterious to a beginners -- it took me years to understand where the balance was being held in the simple bank account example in SICP. Nor would rescue forays into the manual necessarily help untangle such knots, because they depend on recognizing idioms and intuiting what the designer of the code was trying to accomplish with them. IMHO, this is the area in which someone with education or experience has a huge advantage over a total novice, and where formal education could turbocharge a beginner's self-confidence.Perhaps this impulse came from the feeling that introductory programming is taught in ways that are so informed by extreme philosophies that there is a gap in the middle-ground. That is to say, universities tend to insist on teaching fundamentals, while companies equally adamantly insist on teaching practical knowledge, so it is hard to find something that highlights "the fundamental in the context of the practical" even though that may be what people need most. "Practical" knowledge is mostly both too easy to learn, and yet becomes irrelevant too quickly to be worth taking too much time to study, but "fundamental" knowledge can be hard to relate to practice when taught out of context. And the people who teach fundamentals usually prefer to teach either object-oriented styles or functional ones, both ignoring that the in the real world they mix, and sometimes the hairiest conundrums (like Javascript's "this") come from their interaction. So I felt there was a missing piece in the middle ground between these different educational philosophies. But, as I said, this was a nascent project, merely a conception. I wonder if anyone else thinks there is this gap and whether it is worth the effort to fill?
This is something that I believe is very important. Working as a programming teacher for a couple of years now I believe this is the biggest issue we face, linking the fundamentals to real world applications.
When I was in college and had my statistics classes all I could think was how boring it all was and that it had no relationship with programming, so why should I ever waste any time on this? Next thing i know is that I'm writing a recommendations engine on my second job and I'm going back to the statistics books for the background I needed to build it.
The CS courses need to improve on tying the fundamental knowledge they're teaching to the real problems these things are supposed to be solving, none of these theories came out of thin air, they all were created based on a real world need by somewhere in time (no pun intended) we lost track of that and started teaching it all just for the sake of teaching. We need to get back to where we show people why they're learning this and how they can apply this knowledge in their real life applications. Learning functional programming? Get a high concurrency example and show how simpler it could be implemented in a functional language instead of an imperative one. Teaching statistics? Start using the content for a machine learning class.
I think there is a HUGE space for "fundamentals" teaching with a real world background, even fundamentals teaching alone is still causing people to try them again (like coursera and all the other services). The problems we're solving today are much bigger than the usual CRUD and experience with the basic ideas on our field, like algorithms, data structures, language paradigms is becoming more and more important.
thanks for reading my long posts,
They're surely worth reading :)
Rebecca
-
Maurício Linhares
Amy Newell
May 23, 2012, 8:21:55 AM5/23/12
to Boston Ruby Group
Sorry I'm late to the party on this conversation, and I couldn't make
the meeting last night, but here are some thoughts I have:
first, I think providing childcare is awesome and to be preferred, but
another option would be to offer babysitter scholarships for those
who'd like to attend but can't afford the childcare. Not everyone will
need childcare, after all, and it might be easier to organize that
way. In addition, a welcome to babes-in-arms is also helpful; nursing
infants are difficult to leave with a sitter all day long, and they
also sleep a lot, so are not that disruptive to classes. My very first
ruby group meeting, five years ago now(!) I brought my three-month-old
with me and nursed her in the back row of seats -- worked out fine.
That said, childcare on-site is probably ideal; I think the usual
place people do that kind of thing is at churches and synagogues,
which are already set up with some kind of children's space, are cheap
to rent, and understand all the liability issues involved already so
can probably give advice.
On a different topic, people should not neglect teaching small classes
in-company or to their friends as a means of increasing diversity and
spreading the ruby love. I taught a short course on programming to the
women in my company last spring, and as a result our team has one
newly-minted apprentice rails developer who transferred from a
different department. This was not hard from my end, it was something
like three classes on super-basic programming and then a lot of "hey,
I think you'd be good at this, you should learn more". My company and
our director of engineering did have to make the transfer happen, and
be willing for us to devote the time to train and mentor, but it's
well worth it to develop in-house talent. People looking to hire and/
or increase diversity might first look in their own companies to see
who might be trainable. Just a thought -- it's working for us at
PatientsLikeMe.
Amy
> >>>>>http://www.women2.com/pygotham-conference-in-new-york-on-september-16...
> >>>>>> from: Jessica McKellar <jessica.mckel...@gmail.com>
> >>>>>> cc: Asheesh Laroia <ashe...@asheesh.org>
> >>>>>> description). They are...
>
> read more »
the meeting last night, but here are some thoughts I have:
first, I think providing childcare is awesome and to be preferred, but
another option would be to offer babysitter scholarships for those
who'd like to attend but can't afford the childcare. Not everyone will
need childcare, after all, and it might be easier to organize that
way. In addition, a welcome to babes-in-arms is also helpful; nursing
infants are difficult to leave with a sitter all day long, and they
also sleep a lot, so are not that disruptive to classes. My very first
ruby group meeting, five years ago now(!) I brought my three-month-old
with me and nursed her in the back row of seats -- worked out fine.
That said, childcare on-site is probably ideal; I think the usual
place people do that kind of thing is at churches and synagogues,
which are already set up with some kind of children's space, are cheap
to rent, and understand all the liability issues involved already so
can probably give advice.
On a different topic, people should not neglect teaching small classes
in-company or to their friends as a means of increasing diversity and
spreading the ruby love. I taught a short course on programming to the
women in my company last spring, and as a result our team has one
newly-minted apprentice rails developer who transferred from a
different department. This was not hard from my end, it was something
like three classes on super-basic programming and then a lot of "hey,
I think you'd be good at this, you should learn more". My company and
our director of engineering did have to make the transfer happen, and
be willing for us to devote the time to train and mentor, but it's
well worth it to develop in-house talent. People looking to hire and/
or increase diversity might first look in their own companies to see
who might be trainable. Just a thought -- it's working for us at
PatientsLikeMe.
Amy
> >>>>> https://openhatch.org/wiki/Indianapolis_Python_Workshop
>
> >>>>> And was called out by Jessica McKellar in a blog post:
>
> >>>>>http://geekfeminism.org/2011/07/02/lessons-learned-from-the-boston-py...
>
> >>>>> And was called out by Jessica McKellar in a blog post:
>
>
> >>>>> She might have mentioned it in the Pycon pres., but I couldn't find
> >>>>> it.
>
> >>>>> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Chad Pytel <c...@thoughtbot.com>
> >>>>> She might have mentioned it in the Pycon pres., but I couldn't find
> >>>>> it.
>
> >>>>>> cc: Asheesh Laroia <ashe...@asheesh.org>
> >>>>>> subject: Re: Setting up Asheesh for the BostonRB outreach and
> >>>>>> mentoring meeting
>
> >>>>>> Hi Daniel,
>
> >>>>>>> - Should we focus on setting up a mentoring network for existing
> >>>>>>> members
> >>>>>>> of BostonRB,
>
> >>>>>> In my experience, a) mentoring successfully is a lot of work, and b)
> >>>>>> most
> >>>>>> people aren't good mentors. It's also a lot of work for impact on a
> >>>>>> comparatively small number of people.
>
> >>>>>>> or focus on easing the entry of beginners and women into
> >>>>>>> the BostonRB community, which would entail much more intensive
> >>>>>>> efforts
> >>>>>>> like the Boston Python workshop? Is it unwise to try to do both?
> >>>>>>> Can
> >>>>>>> we start with one and then expand to the order, and in which
> >>>>>>> order?
> >>>>>>> Should we go big or go small and incremental?
>
> >>>>>> I don't know much about the Boston Ruby community, but my general
> >>>>>> advice
> >>>>>> for user groups is to start with an unstructured, beginner-friendly
> >>>>>> project
> >>>>>> night like we do in Boston Python (see e.g.
> >>>>>>http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/51175912/for an example event
> >>>>>> mentoring meeting
>
> >>>>>> Hi Daniel,
>
> >>>>>>> - Should we focus on setting up a mentoring network for existing
> >>>>>>> members
> >>>>>>> of BostonRB,
>
> >>>>>> In my experience, a) mentoring successfully is a lot of work, and b)
> >>>>>> most
> >>>>>> people aren't good mentors. It's also a lot of work for impact on a
> >>>>>> comparatively small number of people.
>
> >>>>>>> or focus on easing the entry of beginners and women into
> >>>>>>> the BostonRB community, which would entail much more intensive
> >>>>>>> efforts
> >>>>>>> like the Boston Python workshop? Is it unwise to try to do both?
> >>>>>>> Can
> >>>>>>> we start with one and then expand to the order, and in which
> >>>>>>> order?
> >>>>>>> Should we go big or go small and incremental?
>
> >>>>>> I don't know much about the Boston Ruby community, but my general
> >>>>>> advice
> >>>>>> for user groups is to start with an unstructured, beginner-friendly
> >>>>>> project
> >>>>>> night like we do in Boston Python (see e.g.
> >>>>>> description). They are...
>
> read more »
Daniel Choi
May 23, 2012, 8:39:08 AM5/23/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Hi Amy
I'm glad you're joining the conversation. I enjoy hearing success
stories like the one you're sharing. It's my hope that if a lot more Boston
Ruby members got involved in teaching, whether at official Boston Ruby
events or beyond, we'll start realizing that we can make a big positive
impact on people with less effort than we might at first imagine. And
a big positive impact on the Boston Ruby community in general.
Dan
Braulio Carreno
May 23, 2012, 10:57:07 AM5/23/12
to Boston Ruby Group
We created a mailing list for the people working on this effort and
sent invitations to the addresses found in the google doc, if I miss
someone please register.
http://groups.google.com/group/bostonrb-outreach-education
sent invitations to the addresses found in the google doc, if I miss
someone please register.
http://groups.google.com/group/bostonrb-outreach-education
Daniel Choi
May 23, 2012, 1:18:56 PM5/23/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Thank you Braulio.
Yes, this will be the official mail list for those who want to volunteer for the outreach and education effort.
Yes, this will be the official mail list for those who want to volunteer for the outreach and education effort.
Ian Roughley
May 22, 2012, 10:05:05 AM5/22/12
to boston-r...@googlegroups.com
Let me throw out another suggestion - the current format of the meetings with 3-4 talks, or even more for lightening talk nights, glosses over a lot of information. This allows more experienced developers (independent of background) to go and the research to find out more, but I it can be extremely intimidating to those new to ruby and new to rails.
I'd like to suggest scheduling a meeting once per quarter that slows down and does a "deep-dive" into a basic feature or gem. Not only will this help newer people, but I also think it'll be beneficial to everyone as the intricacies can be explored.
/Ian
I'd like to suggest scheduling a meeting once per quarter that slows down and does a "deep-dive" into a basic feature or gem. Not only will this help newer people, but I also think it'll be beneficial to everyone as the intricacies can be explored.
/Ian
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