Susan Potter is a wearer of many hats, but mostly software engineer and practicing applications architect (based in Chicago, IL).

Employer: Finsignia

Extras: Last month, Susan presented at WindyCityDB conference in Chicago, IL on Link-walking with Riak. She was a speaker at Code PaLOUsa 2011 in June. Talk: Deploying distributed software services to the cloud without breaking a sweat. She is very active in the open source community with GitHub personal repositories, Twitter4R and collection of Gists.

Our short Q&A with Susan Potter:

What is your technical background?

At university I studied Mathematics, but audited Computer Science courses while writing an experimental parallel and distributed PDE solver first in C, then in C++ and finally in Java, which didn’t have much utility other than to teach me how not to write multi-threaded or distributed software.After graduating I worked for investment banks in London before skipping off to a San Francisco startup building a B2B trading platform and have since been working as a senior software consultant for hedge funds, investment banks and technology startups all over the US.

What industry sites or blogs do you read regularly?

To be honest, I use my Twitter timeline and some private lists as a fairly reliable source of interesting, relevant and/or thought-provoking technical resources from all over the internet. However, the following links have been fonts of recent software engineering wisdom or great resources in the areas I currently practice within:

• Erlang/OTP resourses:
  Steve Vinoski’s blog,
  erlang-questions mailing list
• Haskell resources:
  Home of Haskell Weekly News,
  Control.Monad.Writer by Don Stewart
• Databases & datastores:
  myNOSQL blog
• Scaling & high-availability:
  High Scalability
• Code:
  GitHub (yes there are other sites, but not as active or fast growing)

What are a few of your favorite development tools and why?

I recently wrote a blog post on the (types of) tools that have made me a better software engineer. In short these are: emacs, vi(m), make, gdb, UNIX commands / utilities, UNIX shells, LaTeX, Git. The blog post explains why.

What tip or advice would you like to impart to women interested in programming?

If you enjoy software development, always learning new things and are excited about the possibilities in this field, then do not let anyone discourage you from persuing it further. There will always be a job market for self-starters that can teach themselves even if they don’t have the right educational background. Make sure to back up what you have learned on your own. Open source projects, blog posts or screencasts that demonstrate your skills in the areas you are looking to get into help much more nowadays than simply having a CS degree with no public portfolio IMHO.

If you were a computer part, what would you be?

A CPU socket comes close. It provides multiple connections (mechanical and electrical) between the microprocessor and circuit board. In the technology community it seems I am always connecting people based on their interests and needs such as connecting business founders with technical founders or hiring managers with skilled developers (mechanical connections). Other times I am suggesting new architectures, software stacks, tools, etc. to solve the problems people I talk to are currently encountering (electrical connections).

aimee daniells (lowercase as requested) is a self-employed software crafter from Winchester, UK.

Her twitter handle: @sermoa and thoughts: http://sermoasquared.co.uk/

Our short Q&A with aimee daniells:

What is your technical background?

I was sponsored through university by IBM. I had an integrated degree where I worked at IBM 3 days a week and studied Computer Science at university 2 days a week. After I graduated I worked for IBM for a few years. Although I began as a developer, they decided to retrain me as a tester. I didn’t like the way IBM made decisions for me.

Now a tester, I looked for a job where I could begin as a tester but progress back into development. This didn’t really work. Fortunately I was learning in my spare time. I learned Ruby on Rails and made the application mychores.co.uk – a team based tracking system for recurring tasks. On the strength of that I got a job with Eden Development, an agile web development and consultancy company.

I worked at Eden for 3 years and took an apprenticeship under Enrique Comba Riepenhausen. I learned an incredible amount about good quality, reliable, well tested software and user experience design. Towards the end I took on two apprentices, one of whom I am still in regular contact with.

I am now an independent software crafter, doing freelance work and visiting companies to work as a contractor. I love what I do, I love meeting people and I love learning and sharing. At the last company I’ve just finished working at, I was approached by somebody who wanted to be mentored by me, who has now become my newest apprentice.

What industry sites or blogs do you read regularly?

I do not read RSS. I used to be subscribed to hundreds but I couldn’t read them all. These days I get all the news I need through twitter.

What are a few of your favorite development tools and why?

I love my macbook. It just does exactly what I want it to do, feels reliable and very rarely annoys me. I prefer to develop using Vim because I feel it is very powerful and I can express my intentions using intuitive combinations of keystrokes. I typed on the Dvorak keyboard layout for years, but I’ve recently changed to Colemak. I find it very comfortable and efficient to type on.

What tip or advice would you like to impart to women interested in programming?

Ask questions. Better to ask a silly question one day than give a silly answer another day. There is no such thing as silly questions, only silly answers. Listen a lot and ponder. Think carefully about what you believe. Share your opinions when asked. Share whatever you know. Be generous. Blog about things you find interesting: somebody else will do too. Ask for things you need. If you want to learn more, find a mentor. Don’t wait for people to do things for you. Make your own luck. Be extremely proud of who you are. Look yourself in the mirror every day and tell yourself how wonderful you are. Be humble. Don’t brag, but let your skills speak for themselves.

Last question on our q&a, if you were a computer part, what would you be?

I would be the Any key!

Nola Stowe is a co-founder of devChix from the Texas, USA.
You can reach her at @rubygeekdotcom on twitter.
She is currently a web developer at Game Salad.
Game Salad is a free tool that creates games for the iPhone, iPad, Mac
& Web with no coding required.

Her linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nolastowe &
She blogs at RubyGeek.

Our short Q&A with Nola Stowe:

What is your technical background?

I started programming the summer I turned 13. I had a TRS-80 and read the BASIC programming book that came with it, along with another programming book I bought at Radio Shack. I had a cassette tape drive to save my files and a 5inc thermal printer. I programmed math games for my siblings. I distinctly remember making a program that would roll five dice and using ascii characters to draw  a box around the number. You could then choose which dice to re-roll. Ahh, sometimes I long for those summer days and also think: “…. boy, how much better I could have been if I had the internet like now!”

In college, I discovered the fun of web development so I majored in Computer Information System and Design Studio minor. I actually petitioned to have my water color class count towards my CIS degree, arguing that since my chosen field was web programming with a design minor, it is good to have the training and understanding of color principles from my water color class. They accepted my petition

What industry sites or blogs do you read regularly?

I check:

rubyinside.com – ruby is my favorite language; this is a great site to keep up with the ever-changing landscape

techcrunch.com – to keep up with what’s new with facebook, google, etc

railscasts.com – weekly screencasts, they are super informative

teachmetocode.com – screencasts on web development, very helpful

peepcode.com – screencasts at affordable prices, and great supporters of devChix.com

What are a few of your favorite development tools and why?

I use vim and textmate. It depends on the environment. For home development, I am on Ubuntu so I use Vim. For work, I use a Mac so I use both Vim and Textmate , but lately I’ve been using Textmate a lot.

What tip or advice would you like to impart to women interested in programming?

It’s a mans world for sure. Do not take it personally when someone gives you slack. Focus on doing the best work you can so people cannot tell the difference between your work and that of any other. Do not assume every issue you come across is “because you are a  girl” … just focus on what is needed to get the job done.

If you were a computer part, what would you be?

I would be a keyboard because I am always focusing on what is needed to get the job done. If we did not have keyboards, we would not be able to get much done.

We’ve collected a list of the DevChix speaking at conferences (so far) this year. If you are at one of these conferences, be sure to say hi!

April

• Sarah Mei – Red Dot Ruby Conf – Singapore
• Garann Means – jQuery Conference – SF/Bay Area, CA, USA
• Estelle Weyl – jQuery Conference – SF/Bay Area, CA, USA
• Lorna Mitchell – PHP Community Conference – Nashville, TN, USA
• Eleanor McHugh – ACCU 2011 – Oxford, UK

May

• Sarah Mei – FarmhouseConf – Los Angeles, CA, USA 
• Elise Huard – Euruko – Berlin, Germany
• Lorna Mitchell – Dutch PHP Conference – Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Lorna Mitchell – php|tek – Chicago, IL, USA

June

• Garann Means – Texas JavaScript – Austin, TX, USA
• Elise Huard – Nordic Ruby – Goteborg, Sweden
• Elise Huard – Rulu – Lyon, France
• Susan Potter – WindyCityDB – Chicago, IL

July

• Estelle Weyl – CSSSummit – Online, USA
• Christie Koehler – OSCON – Portland, OR, USA
• Estelle Weyl – OSCON – Portland, OR, USA
• Elise Huard – Rubykaigi – Tokyo, Japan

August

• Abby Fichtner – Agile 2011: Lean Startup: How Development Looks Different When You’re Changing the World – Salt Lake City, UT, USA
• Lori Olson – Madison Ruby – Madison WI, USA

October

• Ruthie BenDor – EECI – Brooklyn, NY, USA
• Lorna Mitchell – PHPCon Poland – Kielce, Poland

This is an example of how devchix can work as a resource to connect events with developers.  If the organizers of this conference hadn’t reached out through this group I’d never have heard that it was happening, and I’m certainly glad I did.

Last weekend Greenhorn and Thoughtbot put on the D8 event (which stands for Developers x 4 & Designers x 4) at the Microsoft Research Center in Cambridge, MA.  It was a collection of 10 minute of presentations designed to introduce high school and college students interested in web design and/or development to the tools and workflow used by local start ups.  The website has lists of speakers and a collection of other resources for further reading on the topics presented. Read the rest of this entry »

The DevChix community recently attacked the issue of what to do about a “blah” workplace environment. If you’ve done development for any length of time, or for more than a few companies, you’ve probably experienced the same thing somewhere along the way. Your coworkers are nice folks and everyone gets along, but there’s no real camaraderie. People work hard and produce good code, but no one seems too terribly excited about it. Sound familiar?

Lots of companies try to guard against this with perks meant to be fun and make work feel less formal. But sometimes all the kegerators in the world don’t make a difference. One of the DevChix described her experience in an office that sounds on paper like the Disneyland of workplaces:

“There are foosball tables, pool tables, air hockey tables and a beer keg in the kitchen. We work in quad-pods where there are 4 people in each large sized pod. The idea was to create a space open to collaboration. Nobody really talks much though. Things like the gaming tables are nice but I don’t see them having much impact. Some people grab a pint [from the keg] after 5pm and work at their desk, again not talking much. “

A “neutral” company culture, it seems, is not a problem you can just throw a couple foosball tables at. The DevChix suggested the problem is rooted in how a company treats its devs.

Where does uninspiring culture begin?

If you guessed “management”, the list agrees with you (at least partially). Developer empowerment was highlighted as one of the biggest things that make a difference in developers’ passion at work. Without realizing it, managers may be making their developers feel isolated or ignored:

“Management might be thinking that what they’re working on isn’t that relevant to their staff, or is relevant but they haven’t made significant enough progress to share – but communicating the use of your time, however vaguely, on a regular basis has a way of clearing the air.  It says, “I’m not forgetting about you” and also promotes open communication (when I’m not hearing anything from a manager, I don’t feel as comfortable going to him or her with my problems).  I’ve been surprised at how strong of a reaction seeing upper management going in and out of meetings without sharing any details whatsoever has had on me, and it’s not even that I want to have a lot of data.”

Another problem can be the ways in which developers are encouraged to interact. If collaboration is rare, developers have less to talk about as developers. The extroverted ones will probably find other things to discuss around the water cooler, but if they aren’t working together, it’s likely that company culture is repressing the urge to share ideas over the cubicle wall. It’s important to consider how many developers are likely to be introverts – development, after all, isn’t sales – and leave a space for interaction at work that isn’t so unstructured that it exhausts anyone or excludes them. In short, aimless chatter can be tiring or distracting, but active teamwork is inspiring.

What can companies do differently?

One of the more unanimous suggestions was to offer developers the opportunity to do non-business-driven projects. Giving teams the opportunity to use new technologies, proof of concept the things they think are important, and generally develop something to their own standards gives developers a voice in what they’re doing. Google’s 20% time was offered as an example of this. Having a policy like this and promoting it as aggressively as Google does creates an impression of a place where developers’ ideas are sought out and supported, even in outsiders. And supporting developer-driven projects doesn’t mean simply tolerating them. The DevChix who gave examples of similar projects they’d worked on mentioned that these – in whole or in part – had eventually been used by their employers in “normal” projects.

Something that was new to me was the idea of project leads bidding on resources to give developers more control over what they’re working on (a project owner could say, “I need this done but it’s the only thing I need done this sprint,” if I understand correctly). At a busy agency or a start-up just getting its feet under it, committing 20% of each developer’s time to projects that might turn out to be technically infeasible might be too expensive. Letting developers choose their projects would be a great alternative.

Toward the end of promoting camaraderie and sharing knowledge, something developers might be able to do without having to get management approval is peer code reviews. This is certainly more challenging when everyone is working on a separate project, but consider that not everyone has to share all their code all the time. The woman who suggested this mentioned that her team had one or two people presenting once a week, something that should be manageable no matter how many different projects a dev team was working on.

A simple but important suggestion that was brought up by different people with different examples was offering developers the chance to “learn something cool”. This could be done by in-office trainings, brown bag lunches, or sending developers to conferences, but the DevChix who mentioned it seemed to agree that it’s a big part of getting developers excited. These can range in cost to the company all the way up to (and occasionally past) $2k, but consider what the employer gets in return:

“It was amazing how [attending a conference turned] jaded, tired corporate workers into ra-ra cheerleaders like overnight. The amount of info you can get at these things – along with connections of course – is intense. And it’s great to show that the corporation is willing to invest in the employee.”

If a company can’t spend the money on conference registration, air travel, and a hotel stay for an employee, they could also try to bring the expertise to the developers. It was pointed out that many technical leaders are happy to share an hour of their time, and this gives everyone on the team the chance to learn together instead of one or two people getting to go to a conference while the rest of the team is back at the office park slaving away. If a company is so isolated that the only way to boost developer knowledge is through sending employees out of town for conferences, one suggestion was to give the rest of the dev team the same time off their peer attending the conference was getting to read, learn, and work on exciting proofs of concept.

In summary, the DevChix who participated in this thread emphasized the need to treat smart, valuable people like smart, valuable people, whether you manage them or sit next to them. One nice thing about developers is that you don’t really need a foosball table to get them excited about coming into the office – generally you just need to give them the freedom to do what they love: write good code.

Wow so many workshops!  I will be helping run the Chicago one on the weekend of Feb. 4-5th details are at the bottom of this press release. Be sure to tell others or volunteer!  We could also use sponsors so if any one would like to donate just email me directly. desi.mcadam at gmail

RailsBridge Open Workshop Project Announces Workshops for 2011

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — The RailsBridge Open Workshop project, which teaches web application development to both programmers and non-programmers, is announcing eight more of its popular free workshops for women in 2011.

The project, which has trained almost 600 people, nearly 500 of them women, in five cities in the past year and a half, is gaining speed in 2011.  RailsBridge has planned eight workshops so far, mostly in San Francisco, but branching out to the north bay, as well as Chicago and Seattle.

Read More..

Workshops Confirmed for 2011

The following workshops have confirmed venues and leaders.  Several additional workshops are also in the planning stages:

February 4-5, Twitter, San Francisco, led by Amy Chen (already full)

February 4-5, Hashrocket, Chicago, led by Desi McAdam – Attendees Meetup Page Volunteers Meetup Page:

March 11-12, Enphase Energy, Petaluma, led by Brenda Strech & Ilen Zazueta-Hall (meetup)

April 7-8, ModCloth, San Francisco, Megan Guering

April, White Pages, Seattle, Elise Worthy

May 6-7, SoMA Central, San Francisco, led by Andrea Ängquist and Raphael Lee

July 15-16, Miso, San Francisco, Amy Lightholder, Rachel Myers

August 5-6, Quid, San Francisco, Andrea Angquist, Walter Y

In February I finally decided to do something I always wanted to do with DevChix. I wanted to lead a group project intended for those who wanted to learn and could commit to 2 hours a week. I had 3 volunteers.. then two.. and then one! But thats ok, I know people get busy and other things going on, so no big deal. But cool thing is, even those that left said they learned something. So, my goal was still reached!

The Project

I had this idea in my head for awhile. One thing with lists is, you need to write down something if you want to do it today. We all have todo lists, and there are somethings we want to do every day. You may try to remember them without a list, or maybe you write them out. I thought it would be cool to have a todo list app that will give your list, allow you to check them off, then next day you have the same list. Bonus to have a graph of how many you did each day of the week. I think its motivating to see a graph of my progress.

Getting Started

Its my experience, when I start an app, I add user login and I get hung up on the authentication, tests and stuff and never get to the meat of the app. So I wrote a simple login system with just a username (no password), threw it in the session and wrote some simple methods to check to see if logged in. Later we replaced it with Devise with not much trouble at all.

What we learned

• git, making branches, push and pull
• erb and haml
• grid 960
• HighCharts a javascript graphing library
  devise, we added a whitelist so we can have a beta with only certain email addresses allowed to sign up.

• publishing with heroku
• rails of course

Challenges

Summer got busy, including a cross country move for me and new job! We still managed to meet about every 2 weeks. We used github for our code. We put our tasks in Pivotal Tracker and that worked fine. We used Github wiki to record meeting notes, what happened since last meeting and who is doing what for the next week. We’ve been able to meet weekly the past month or so as the summer is winding down.

Whats next?

We are deploying the app to DevChix for beta testing. From there, not sure.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference took place again this year in San Francisco, kicking off with the Steve Jobs keynote.

The iPhone 4 announcement came as no surprise to any Gizmodo readers, but for most developers, this didn’t matter: the conference highlights typically come AFTER the keynote anyway.  And we were rewarded with a new XCode, Safari 5, and other goodies that I can’t talk about because the rest is under NDA!

However, there is lots to show and see outside the NDA, including some of the amazing women developers.  So come along and get a taste of the keynote line, the structure of our days, the parties, and a peek at some of the wonderful attendees who make WWDC such a fun and educational event:

Lastly, if you are a certified Apple developer and want to see the sessions you missed, Apple has released them for FREE to all registered developers!

Seems like Pair Programming is “all the rage” lately in my circles. I haven’t exactly done it before but after hearing about the success and rapid knowledge growth amongst those that pair program…I was almost dying to try it! Especially after i saw David Chelimsky and Corey Haines at WindyCityRails in Sept 2009. I saw them pair and do BDD with Rspec/Cucumber and it was so fascinating, It was like I was watching a ballet as they hopped from RSpec to Cucumber and back and forth. I was like, wow…I wish I was that good! I would have paid good money for a recording of that so I could watch it again and again! I see Corey Haines traveling around pairing with people too. Some people get together and play cards, but Corey gets together to code!

So ok, I like code, I like people, I want to try it! I live a little south of Chicago so its a long commute and it seemed everyone was so busy to pair in person when I asked. I asked on Devchix mailing list for suggestions on how to do pairing online. I had found a few, and the group had some good suggestions. I even had a volunteer to try it with me! This week aimee and I set a few hours aside to try it and see if we could do it!

This article was also sort of “paired” as it was written from my perspective with input and suggestions from aimee!

We asked on Devchix mailing list for suggestions on how to do pairing online. I had found a few, and the group had some good suggestions. I even had a volunteer to try it with me! This week aimee and I set a few hours aside to try it and see if we could do it!

After introductions on Skype we set about getting a shared environment in which to code together. Ideally, we wanted some kind of desktop sharing so we could run tests, console and editor.

We had heard of a few tools and got suggestions from the devchix list:

IChat desktop sharing – we couldn’t get this to work, we did different things and it would appear to connect but then it failed. I tried to mess with settings for Sharing on mac, but nothing doing.

Rio seems to be a library to make collaborative apps, not to use in a pair programming environment.

BeSpin was hard to use.. we couldn’t figure out exactly how to use it. It almost seemed to offer to import the git repository we were working on, but then it said it only supports Subversion and Mercurial, not git.

SubEthaEdit worked but we would have to open each file individually and share each file… unless I was missing something. This would be fine for collaborating on a single file but then we could not share the test runs, terminal commands or view the browser together.

Etherpad – we didn’t end up trying this but I have used it before to debug some code or try out ideas with a friend. They recently got bought by Google, so it would be interesting to see what they do with it. This would suffer the same limitations as SubEthaEdit in that it’s just a text editor.

GoToMeeting (which is $40-50/month) its a little steep for the open source work I want to do. But people say it works really well.

VNC and Unix Screen – aimee had used this successfully before but since we weren’t on the same network, just our laptops at home, we weren’t sure it how we could make it work easily.

Then we came to TeamViewer which worked brilliantly! We shared desktop and I could type in aimee’s console window, see the tests running and type in textmate. Even with aimee on her Dvorak keyboard and I on Qwerty! I could type fine but couldn’t copy/paste with keyboard shortcuts so I used the mouse to copy/paste and it worked fine.

All in all, it was an awesome experience and I picked up on a few tidbits of knowledge from aimee on git, and rake! I had some bits of code from another project i was able to quickly copy/paste and get us rolling. We had a few discussions about coding style as we went.

Since aimee was more familiar with the codebase, she mainly wrote the behavioral specs and I wrote the code to satisfy them. We plan to switch around next time, when we pair on a different project that I’ve been developing for a while.