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.

Hi, just a quick short break from all the hot topics and comments. We do have a collection of wonderful articles that you may find helpful as Tim Bray mentioned on his post. These articles are written with passion and sometimes a result of views , ideas or solutions we implement from our individual projects in the workplace.

I feel like I am one of the gatekeepers to all these articles so I added a page so everyone can easily find the list of all the good stuff written to date: All devChix Articles. Now if anyone can tell me how to add a sort order, ie ASC by title, in the Word Press archive tag — that would be really swell. Thanks.

Download Subversion (win binaries)

Download Tortoise

Fig. 1 Pretty Overlays

Fig. 2 Integration with Explorer

Additional Sources:
Using Subversion on Windows
Subversion on Windows quick start

” International Women’s Day is the story of ordinary women as makers of history; it is rooted in the centuries-old struggle of women to participate in society on an equal footing with men. In ancient Greece, Lysistrata initiated a sexual strike against men in order to end war; during the French Revolution, Parisian women calling for “liberty, equality, fraternity” marched on Versailles to demand women’s suffrage.”

Happy International Women’s Day to all!

I’ve been in the business of doing websites since 1998. Little did I know that no one would protect a Registrant if your domain registrar is a fraud or if they decide to take your domain hostage. Whoa?! Such huge allegations you say? We will get to that. You’d want to hear this story.

The big question – -

If you are reading this blog post, I’m 100% sure you own a domain or two yourselves or know of someone who does. Can you trust your registrar? I found out the hard way that you couldn’t. I am one of those victimized by RegisterFly. Charles Ferri’s video shows it all. The Malaysia Sun has a full story on the scandal. Bob Parson, CEO of GoDaddy, has a blog post about this RegistryFly Scandal too.

Based on my experience from this, there’s no clear lawful process to immediately “siege” back a domain you own when your Registrar has your domain in its clutches and NO ONE seems to know how to exactly fix this kind of problem other than ICANN’s sending breach of contract memos and then maybe finally canceling the registrar’s accreditation.

What about the stolen domains? What about the time sites becoming inoperable because of this scandal and it’s disruption to business? How is that addressed/resolved? Rumors have it that ICANN will migrate those customers to another registrar soon. I’ve emailed ICANN and InterNic, and yet, I have not heard nor receive any email from them to address my problem. I am but one of the thousands banging their head on the wall and feeling just helpless. People are already losing business over this and now they even have to pay to transfer out? Plainly, ridiculous.

I have learned some things from this misfortune and I’d like to share them with you. Please read below:

Steps you can do to protect your domain – -

1. Obviously, watch out for red flags: renewals not going through but billed for it, support tickets being deleted or left unanswered for days, domain names magically disappearing from your domain management panel, calling customer support and placed on hold for 45 mins only to be forwarded to a 411 directory operator. Yes, seriously that bad! The moment you start seeing that transfer out!
2. Regularly check the WhoIs information of your domain.
3. I cannot emphasize more that it’s very important to have your Administrative Contact Email current! In the event you transfer your domain, an email will be sent out to the administrative contact email to confirm and authorize the process. Don’t worry, it’ll be less tedious to update the contact info using bulk edit if you own more than one domain.
4. Keep a copy of your Authorization Code. This information can be found in your domain management panel under your whois info. The authorization code is your key out if you decide to transfer your domain to a different registrar.
5. Regularly check the Registrar Status of your domain. The status info can also be seen on WhoIs.
6. In situations like the RegisterFly fiasco, it’s better not to dispute the charges on your credit card for payments for domain renewals. Keep them as your proof.

To this date, I still have 12 pending transfers, some renewed domains that still expired and moved out of my control panel so I have no access to the authorization codes. Those domains are now sitting under RegisterFly’s parking pages. Is there hope?

**List last updated 04/19/07** (This list just keeps growing)

Ruby has generated such great interest and following since the launch of Rails. Mantra: Do get a book of Ruby before diving into Rails.

Now while researching, I found links here and there but they were all varied depending on your skill level. This (post) is an attempt and probably not the first attempt to group links, books and training sessions available by skill level. Only published books are included at the time of this writing (..most of them I’ve read and own). I have not included books and links that delve more into getting your rails app into production mode other than Capistrano and Mongrel. Such other methods might end up in another post or as an addendum at a later time. The Advanced Level is geared toward Rails.

A must have reference book:
Ruby In A Nutshell – by Yukihiro Matsumuto

BEGINNER LEVEL –

This level assumes that you are familiar with basic HTML, basic networks/servers and familiar with databases but have no prior programming background and entirely new to back end development.

B-L 1. Books/e-Books/Screencasts:

(Ruby)

• Learn to Program
  - by Chris Pine
• Introduction to Ruby
  - by Jim Arlow, Ila Neustadt
• Everyday Scripting with Ruby: For Teams, Testers, and You
  - by Brian Marick

(Rails)

• Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications (Rails 1.2)
  - by Patrick Lenz (I personally give this book a 5 Star)

B-L 2. Links:

• Ruby-Lang
• Ruby Wiki Book
• Ruby Cheat Sheet v.1 – Cenophobie
• Ruby on Rails
  - with links on How to install Ruby and Rails in a dev environment
• Ruby on Rails Wiki Book
• Rails API
• Rails Cheat Sheet – ILJD

B-L 3. Training/Classes:

• Ruby on Rails Training – Pragmatic Studio
• Ruby on Rails TDD Boot Camp – Obtiva
• RoR: Intro to Intermediate – RubyPal/David Black

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL –

This level assumes that you are very familiar with HTML, CSS, Javascipts, databases and have been doing back-end development with either ASP, Coldfusion, PHP, .NET and Java

I-L 1. Books/e-Books/Screencasts:

(Ruby)

• Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers (5 star)
  - by David Black
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition
  - by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt
• The Ruby Way, Second Edition: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming
  - by Hal Fulton

(Rails)

• Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Ed. (Rails 1.2)
  - by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, Andreas Schwarz
• Introduction to Ruby on Rails and Ajax
  - by Jim Arlow, Ila Neustadt
• RailsCast (Podcasts last from between 1 -7 mins so far. Two thumbs up. 5 star)
  by Ryan Bates

I-L 2. Links:

• Start At The Beginning
• Top 12 RoR Tutorials (some outdated)
• Top 30 RoR Tutorials (some outdated)
• Amy Hoy’s Blog
• RubyForge

I-L 3. Training/Classes:

• Ruby on Rails Training – Pragmatic Studio
• Ruby on Rails TDD Boot Camp – Obtiva

ADVANCED LEVEL -

This level assumes that you are breathing and thriving in ruby and running rails applications plus adding Ajax, Subversion, Capistrano and Mongrel into the mix.

A-L 1. Books/e-Books/Screencasts:

• Rails Recipes (5 star)
  - by Chad Fowler
• Rails Cookbook (5 star)
  - by Rob Orsini
• Ajax on Rails
  - by Scott Raymond
• The Money Train (Rails 1.1.6.)
  - by Ben Curtis
• PeepCode ScreenCasts
  - by Geoffrey Grosenbach et al
• Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion
  - by Mike Mason
• Mongrel
  - by Angel Dobbs-Sciortino
• Mongrel (Digital Shortcut): Serving, Deploying, and Extending Your Ruby Applications
  - by Matt Pelletier, Zed Shaw
• Bestechvideos for ROR
  - collections by Alexey Kovyrin

A-L 2. Links:

• Capistrano: Automating Application Deployment Manual
• Mongrel at RubyForge
• Rails Migration Cheat Sheet
• The Rails Way < - I love this - Jamis Buck & Michael Koziarski
• Putting REST on Rails
• RESTful Rails Cheat Sheet
• Liquid’s Screencast
• Brians Eng’s Rail Links
• Obie Fernandez’ Blog
• Whys’ RedHanded
• Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Blog
• RubyForge’s Code Snipets
• InfoQ’s Ruby Section
• PluginAWeek

A-L 3. Training/Classes:

• Advanced Rails Training – Pragmatic Studio
• Enterprise Ruby: Bending Railsâ„¢ – Obtiva

There’s quite a few blogs out there that are just THAT awesome but do check out Planet RailsConf’s blogroll for a quick list.

I’d love to hear if you have a link or book to recommend and why you’re recommending it.

Emergence of the blog —
Nola hooked us up a few months back and devChix members are now entitled to post and share ideas with the world via this blog using the Word Press blogging engine. This was our very first intro post from Liz, one of our Perl girls, and then everything came rolling in. Yay! The initial theme was screaming pink (Leone by Andiz) and served its purpose well. But surely, back in everyone’s mind was the wish to have a look and feel that we can call our own.

The beginnings –
Back in September of 2006 immediately after the launch of the devChix blog, one of our lovable members, Victoria proposed some logo ideas for devChix. We all picked the girl with the beaming radio glow. Four days later, I helped enhance Victoria’s great idea with this devChix logo set using funny lip spoofs. We were all excited, threw in all our ideas and concerns like too much red lipstick, or not enough girlishness or too much of it. Of course this was a back and forth dialog with women! Then majority wanted a code/programming element within the logo so here came another set. In this last set, we have four variations: the matrix-adapted 1s and 0s feel, the radio beaming glow effect, the simple #hash element and the vertical numerics. Suffice it to say, Neo’s camp won.

After the holidays –
We’re all awol due to the holidays. That’s fully understandable. We nudged and chugged with a few post for events and things some of our talented folks have been getting into. It’s different now. About a week ago, everyone is pitching in and volunteering to post on allotted scheduled times. Thanks to this rekindled enthusiasm, I was engaged and prompted to contribute. I have the devChix logo, which I’ll use to influence the design of the theme.

Theme in early stages —
Using the logo, I tried to get a simple look. This was the beginning of my first comp/mock-up. It didn’t feel right. It had the look of “a cotton-candy-sky-world met screaming blue”. Oh no! from screaming pink to screaming blue! I stopped cause this is not the path I want. I took a break and leveled my hunter. Wow is a good distraction for me at least. While I was riding the gryph, it hit me that I was seeing a lot of different colors. Colors! I came back to the drawing board. The first comp was missing contrast. I could use bold colors with a subtle presentation. Err! Yah! Now I have the colors dealt with. Then came rounded or edged? (That’s such a 2003 question). The quick addition to outdated things of sorts was swirls and warping and an illustration feel. From simple to funky, spicy and hot – my second comp.

Get friends/or not friends to critique your work –
I am by no means a full time designer (nor great) but I know my way around Photoshop and I am very handy with CSS. I do coding most of the time too with Coldfusion and PHP. I love doing both design and code! But I learned that in order to make pretty things useful, you need to have someone ruthlessly nitpick the design. Feedback, good or bad, is your best friend. Listen to the points raised and evaluate it by trade if they’re valid. The feedback I got was that my colors are now too dark and readability is an issue. With a simple color swap – this is my third comp. A total of 26.9 KB for 15 image files, a 2kb css file and this skeleton mark-up, that last comp is now converted to fit a new Word Press template to get the same look.

I hope I also achieved an easy way finding route for our navigation versus our old category set up that looked so clunky. I look forward to the days when we’re able to work on code and design our own apps here at devChix. Cross-fingers!

Work on validations –
It occurs to me that the site can’t validate when content is mashed into the template. That’ll be the tweaking part I hope to smooth in the following days.

***

Thanks to devChix for the opportunity to play. I had fun putting the theme together and thank you for stopping by! /rockon

2/20 8:25 am
Fixed known OmniWeb, Safari and Camino Search Box render issues. Thanks to J. Rentzsch for the screen shots!

Hi there! I’m Carmelyne Thompson and currently residing in South Elgin, IL which is a 40 min drive west of Chicago, IL. I am glad to be a part of devchix. I’m a Sr. Web Developer at Prairie Web Internet Marketing doing Coldfusion, PHP, ASP and alot of Front-End/UI development. I’m usually playing with Photoshop and Illustrator when I’m not hacking my way into someone else’s code. Rails is my favorite right now, and I’m also acquainting myself with Ruby.