Finished the panel discussion a little while ago and several conversations since then and now that I am at a computer I wanted to quickly post about it.

I was very nervous to begin with but all in all I think it went well. We tried to hit on some things that we feel would help with getting more women into the Rails Community specifically as well as in the development world period. We only gave 5 minutes to the CouchDB talk mostly because we personally (Myself, Sarah and Lori) would like to move on. I did tell David Hanson to please keep his mouth shut next time but I did that in a light-hearted way to try and lighten the mood a bit. I hope he took it that way.

My biggest whoops was that I actually said and believed I didn’t know Matt but after the talk he came over and pointed out that I DID indeed know him. In fact, we have had a very lengthy conversation about women in development in the past (I do remember him and did as soon as I connected his face with his name). Anyway I felt like a jackass.

I want to do a more lengthy recap of the whole panel and the various discussions that took place before and after but for now I would like a reprieve. I am a bit on the drained side and if I tried to cover everything just now, I wouldn’t do a very good job. So give me a day or two to get my write up out.. maybe Sarah and Lori will have more energy to do the post than I do just now.

I do want to say thank you to everyone who came to the panel. Including all the Ruby/Rails big wigs.

Cheers
Desi

I made the pledge to post for Finding Ada and here it is.

One of the hardest things I had to do in preparation for this post (Ada Lovelace Day) was to decide who I wanted to post about. I am lucky enough to know so many intelligent, skilled, motivated and inspiring women in technology (and specifically software development) that it was extraordinarily difficult to narrow it down to just a handful. It bothers me that I can’t call out all the women who have had a positive impact on my life and career. To each and every one of you: know that I appreciate you and everything you have done for me. Finally, I would like to say a special thanks to all the ladies in DevChix for their conversations, help, and encouragement to be the best at my job and in my life. As of today, DevChix has 167 members from all around the world. Our organization is comprised entirely of women devoted to software development. You are all my heros.

Okay, on to the few ladies I would like to call out specifically as role models for me:

Nola Stowe: Nola is a developer at Google and we have known each other for a few years now. She was one of the original cofounders of DevChix and deserves the majority of credit for getting us off the ground because she did all the hard work to make it a reality. She has the ability to be involved in so much, both inside work and out, that she simply amazes me. Nola reads and writes reviews for tech books, learns new languages (or picks up old ones), and manages commitments with a myriad of organizations and activities, including DevChix. She does all of this in addition to her full-time job. She is always caring and supportive of the ladies in our organization; always eager to help when someone has a question. Nola, thank you for all that you do.

Jacqui Maher: Jacqui is now a coworker of mine at Hashrocket and I throughly enjoy working with her. She is by far one of the best developers I have ever met and is very respected within Hashrocket, DevChix and the Ruby community. She is socially conscious and makes an effort to improve the world with every chance she gets. She is currently working on the OpenMRS gem for Ruby and recently traveled to Africa to work as a Rails Developer for Baobab Health. She is inspiring in just about every sense of the word. Jacqui, thanks for teaching me that we can make time to use our skills for the greater good of the world.

Liz Henry: I just recently met Liz at the SFO She’s Geeky Event and I have to say this woman is amazing. I know very little about her even though I have run into her at several events since then. Every encounter with her has been enjoyable and she has given me some wisdom each time I have seen her that I didn’t have before. In one of our last meetings, we actually discussed this post. We discussed how some women which we revere as heros would in fact rather not be publicly described as such. (For this reason, I am have asked permission from each of the ladies mentioned in this post before publishing this article.) In addition to being full of very useful information, Liz is also one of the best live bloggers I have ever seen. Liz is capable of capturing an entire session (through notes, tweets, etc.) while still maintaining full attention to the topic at hand; even participating in the actual conversation. She allows people to be present at events that for whatever reason they couldn’t be and for those of us who read her write ups I would just like to say; you rock that shit! Oh yeah and she works for BlogHer, a community for women bloggers. (They have a great conference too!)

Carmelyne Thompson: Carm… Carm is one of the happiest designers/developers I know. She has a positive outlook on everything, all the time. She is always able to see the good in a situation, often times when no one else can. She is an incredible designer, but don’t take my word for it! Go check Carmelyne’s work out for yourself. Carmelyne can implement her designs as well. She has a great depth of knowledge across a wide range of topics within the software development world. Carmelyne is oftentimes one of the first people to respond to ladies on the list asking Ruby and Rails questions and is often one of the first to respond to new member requests making her one of the most active admins at DevChix. I am continually happy to see Carm greeting people to the our group. She is friendly and quick in getting them setup and running with the DevChix organization. Carm, I look forward to working with you in the future!

Audrey Eschright: Audrey is highly involved with the OpenSource Community; doing everything she can to get more women involved with OpenSource initiatives. She is currently working on the Open Source Bridge Conference in Portland and she has been involved with several other events in the area, including: BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland, and others. Audrey reminds me that it’s important to pick your passion and excel at it; that is exactly what she does. She is a very inspiring woman, encouraging others to get involved and speak at these events. Audrey, good job with the conference organizing and congrats on getting that off the ground!

Kathy Sierra: It would be impossible to write this post and omit Kathy. I don’t read many blogs on a day-to-day basis, mostly for lack of time; that is, except Kathy’s blog back when Kathy would post. Kathy was a role model for me and is partly responsible for the aggregated blog on DevChix, representing the entire DevChix community. Unfortunately, she was on the receiving end of some nasty comments and threats causing her to discontinue her blog.

Many women don’t desire the attention they receive for putting their personal opinions out into the blogosphere. Kathy received more than just attention. But DevChix is a community, first and foremost; if you attack one of us then you are attacking all of us.

We still get some pretty nasty comments from time to time but we are fortunate that it hasn’t been too bad; certainly not to the degree that Kathy had. Kathy brought a unique viewpoint to software development and possessed a great voice for presenting it. The community certainly lost something special when she stopped blogging. Kathy, I understand your reason for leaving the blogsphere, I thank you for the time you gave us there, and I hope that one day you will return.

Val Anita Aurora (formerly Val Henson): I have only had the opportunity to meet Val once (for a few hours) but in that brief span of time she helped me tremendously. She is a Linux Kernel developer and has been involved with the LinuxChix organization for many years.

Val offered sound advice to me early on in the organization of DevChix; advice that I cannot thank her enough for. She pointed me to a number of resources that would help me understand what I was getting into as well as things which would soon come my way. Additionally, she helped DevChix by promoting us within LinuxChix and giving us some space on the LinuxChix IRC server. I continually look to the LinuxChix organization for guidance and can’t thank them enough for their support. Val, plain and simple, you are a personal hero to me and LinuxChix is an organizational hero to DevChix.

NOTE: I was not able to get permission from Kathy Sierra but I am hoping since she is already in the public eye she doesn’t mind me calling her out as a role model.

Cheers and Thanks for reading my Ada Lovelace Day Post.

Just wanted to remind everyone about the upcoming She’s Geeky Event in Mountain View CA Jan 30 – 31st. I already registered and got my flight booked so that I can be there. I hear from people who went last year and to the most recent one that the experience has been really good. So go check them out and get registered if you want to go.

Cheers
Desi

I use HopToad by the Thoughtbot Guys (I say guys because I know they don’t have any girls on the team *wink*) to handle exceptions from my rails apps these days but today I found myself in a situation where I needed to use the exception_notification plugin instead. I haven’t used the plugin for quite sometime so I wanted to make sure I had everything all setup correctly before pushing out to staging and production. I remembered that I had done this before in development but I couldn’t remember everything I needed to do so I, of course, asked uncle Google. After reading the readme and a little googling I figured out what I needed to do in order to see it work in development. It took me far longer than I wanted and I don’t want to go through that again in the future so I figured I would just write a quick blog post to remind me next time I want to do it.

So here goes:

First get Exception notification all setup (this is all from the readme file)

script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git

then in application.rb put
include ExceptionNotifiable

then in environment.rb put
ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients = %w(joe@schmoe.com bill@schmoe.com)

Once you have it setup you can do all the other stuff that lets you see it work in your development environment.

put the following two lines in your application.rb file
alias :rescue_action_locally :rescue_action_in_public
local_addresses.clear

then in your development.rb file change
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = true
to be
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = false

Exception Notifier doesn’t send email notification on ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound and ActionController::UnknownAction errors. So you will need to create 500 error to see the notification going out in your log. You can just add an action to a controller that throws a divide by zero error, restart your server and hit that action and you should see the notification trigger in your development log.

Once you have seen it work make sure to undo everything in the second section.

Cheers

I am currently in Sao Paulo, Brazil at Rails Summit Latin America and the experience has been great thus far.

Ladies at the conference there is information at the end of this writeup about how to join. If you don’t feel like reading everything in this writeup that is fine but please do read about joining.

In contrast to many conferences I have been to recently I have been to just about every talk at this conference and I have thoroughly enjoyed them all. I say just about because there is a second track that is going on in another room but I haven’t been to those sessions.

The Organizers:
Fabio Akita and Gilberto Mautner Founder of locaweb have done a great job with the conference and I would like to give them a special thanks. The lineup, venue and everything has been great. Obrigado!

Theme:
I think most conferences, through the keynotes, some how seem to create a theme. The theme that I am picking up on at this conference is this: “Have No Fear” and “Just Do It”. No one actually said either of those two things but thats basically what I am taking away from most of the keynotes. They have all been especially encouraging for people to become involved. Contribute, create, and code. Give back to the community and get involved. Don’t be afraid .. put yourself out there and learn from the feedback you get.. learn from the experiences of creating.. do side projects.. basically be PASSIONATE.

The Talks:
All the talks I have seen have been excellent. I give them an excellent rating because they have all had the qualities I look for in a talk.
1. The content is good and interesting.
2. The delivery of that content is entertaining or at least engaging.

Chad Fowler – I really enjoyed Chad’s talk and as I sit here I am struggling to figure out a way to describe his talk and actually do it justice. He spoke about his background in music and how that has translated to his life as a developer. In addition, he spoke about being remarkable. He talked about many ways in which people are remarkable and many ways in which we ourselves can become remarkable people. He touched on many things and did so in such a way that I was able to stay engaged with him. There were pictures and video’s and graphs and fake numbers and.. anyway about the best I can say is that I personally really enjoyed his talk.

Dr. Nic Williams – Dr. Nic’s presentation is a little easier to sum up but at the same time I can’t really do it justice. Dr. Nic is one of those speakers that if you ever have a chance to see him speak you should definitely take the opportunity. He is hilarious and has a good message. His talk was all about how to contribute back.. how to get involved.. how to participate. Make the future you proud of the you now. Dr. Nic also talked about newgem

Chris Wanstrath – Chris’s keynote started off being about the future of Ruby and RoR but in the end he took it back to the past and where we have come from. He went through a great deal of history on how we got here which I personally enjoyed especially when he pointed out the first ENAIC programmers were all women, unfortunately he was speaking quite fast so I think a lot of his talk was lost in translation. I think the primary thing Chris was trying to get across is to not be afraid. If you have an idea.. make time to get to it you never know where thats going to go. In the very least you gain experience and you gain knowledge. Chris has had many projects in the past but his current claim to fame is all about github.

Jay Fields – Jay’s talk was about the immaturity of testing as a whole. While I agree with some of the things he said I also disagree with some of the things he said. I have had the luxury of getting to pair with Jay on projects before and its always interesting for me to see him speak because I have first hand experience with a lot of things he talks about. He described the problem of immaturity in testing as a whole first with the fact that we can’t even agree on common terminology. He then proceeded to talk about various tools and the pros and cons of each. He covered Selenium, Test:Unit, Rspec, Syntasis, and Expectations. The last two being the most immature of them all and bleeding edge. i.e. use at your own risk. He also answered a few questions about how to make your test suite fun faster and his response was basically that if you are willing to deal with the pain that goes along with it there are tools you can look into using such as null_db, unit_record, and ARBS. You can read about them on the null_db page on Agile Web Development site. That page links out to the other plugins. Jay also pointed out that all the things he was talking about are from his point of view. In other words its the context in which he works that causes him to have some of the testing beliefs he has.

David Chemlisky – David’s first talk was about doing TDD and in my opinion he did an excellent job of demonstrating TDD. I have seen him give a talk similar in the past and of all the people I have heard try to describe TDD, David is one of the most skilled at it. He gave the talk from the point of view of a teacher which in my opinion is really the only way you can truly explain TDD. He went through the process step by step with us all to show us the way.

His second talk was more about Acceptance testing and story runner and the newest version of story runner which is being called cucumber. He demonstrated how it worked and made sure to give context around all the terminology such as user stories etc. Hopefully there will be some way of seeing this talk again maybe through a screen cast or something of that nature. I’ll be sure to ask him if he would be willing to do that. Or maybe there is one with cucumber? Not sure haven’t had a chance to look yet.
Couple of links to stuff he talked about.
Cucumber
webrat on github and a blog post on it here

On that last note I am actually interested to know if these talks are being recorded and if they will be available somewhere? Anyone know the answer to that?

Obie Fernandez – I haven’t actually seen Obie give his talk yet but I have seen the talk (insider information) so I am going to go ahead and give a recap.. I asked him to plug DevChix and wanted to have this write up already done before he did so.. So Obie’s talk will be about the “Hashrocket Way”. He is basically giving up our secrets.. Like Dr. Nic said no secrets! His main focus will be around how we work, the fact that we follow Agile Tenants and that we value fun, collaboration, and effectiveness. We achieve those things through certain practices such as pair programming, TDD, Story Carding, launch parties etc. Again you should check out his blog.

Ninh Bui and Hongli Lai a.k.a The Phusion Guys – I woke up late so I didn’t catch all of the talk from the Phusion guys but the part that I did catch was hilariously funny and explained things like caching and database sharding. Additionally, they gave a demo of yuumis_comments.. and here is also a link to their blog

I call out all of these guys because they are some of the best speakers I have ever seen and I actually saw them speak at this particular event.

Phillippe Hanrigou – Phillippe is going to be giving a talk on how to effectively do acceptance testing which I am looking forward to but I won’t be able to cover that here because I haven’t seen it and since I don’t have insider info on that one I’ll just have to wait like everyone else. I do know that he will be talking about one tool I hadn’t heard of before called Deep Test. You should check Phillippe’s blog as well

Luis Lavena – Luis will also be giving a talk about surviving with RoR and Ruby as a windows user.. again I think the talk is going to be awesome but its in the future so I can’t really talk about that yet. You should check out his blog!

The Venue:
The venue is quite nice. The main auditorium is very well arranged and has plenty of room despite the fact that there are a lot of people here. There is a very large screen making it easy for everyone to see the slides as well as the speakers. The lighting on the actual speakers is a little weird but other than that the actual conference room is great. The audio is fantastic and the actual hang out area is quite nice as well (other than the lack of air conditioning but thats just me being a little whiny its not really that hot). One other really important point that I want to bring up is the translators. You can get a headset at the checkin area that will translate the talks from English to Spanish and Portuguese and from what I understand the translators have been doing a kick ass job so a special thanks to all those ladies in the booths translating for us.

The Community:
I was very encouraged by the number of people at the conference, the number of people using github (vast majority) and the number of people doing Ruby and RoR development on a day to day basis. It is always an exciting moment for me when I realize it is gaining in support because how much I love the language. In addition, everyone has been extremely helpful and friendly. We meet Tim Case the first day and he was more than willing to take us under his wing and show us around.

One thing that was both encouraging and discouraging is the number of women at the conference. There were women, thats the good news, the bad news is that I think from a ratio point of view the number of women at the conference is on par with what I have experienced at Ruby and RoR conferences in the US. That is to say its pretty small. Usually at conferences since there are so few women I can manage to talk to most of them and but here I have been some what intimidated by the language barrier. One other thing to point out is that there were no women speakers but hey that isn’t really that uncommon. I am hoping that when Obie does his talk and plugs DevChix for us that many of those women who were at the conference that I didn’t get to meet will come to the site and join.

Ladies Please Read
For those women who do happen to come to the site from Brazil and other countries. I would like to say that we have members world wide who can speak a number of different languages so please don’t let that discourage you from joining and participating. We would LOVE to have you all as part of the group. Also encourage other female developers you know.

If you are a women, a developer, interested in joining and/or contributing to DevChix, please contact Desi McAdam at info(-at-)devchix.com with your:

1. Name
2. Email
3. Do you know any one from DevChix?
4. A short 2 sentence bio describing your development background/experience (or what you hope to learn) and a link to your blog if you happen to have one.

Obrigado!

I had an ah ha moment that maybe shouldn’t have been such an ah ha moment but it was so I figured I would share it. Yeah so I am sure most of us have had a situation where we needed to have multiple model forms. Most of the time now days I use attribute_fu to solve this issue but attribute_fu doesn’t work with has_one associations. Today I had a situation where I had two fields that were required for a has_one association object. Long story short it came to me that if we just used the delegate method provided by rails that we could essentially act like the attributes we were setting were on the parent model. This meant we only needed to create one form with multiple fields even though some of those fields were actually on a different model. I then remembered that back when I was working with the guys over at ThoughtWorks that we used a Ruby Extension called Forwardable to be able to delegate multiple attributes on one object.

So instead of this:

delegate :first_name, :to => :profile
delegate :last_name, :to => :profile
delegate :some_other_attribute, :to => :profile


side note: I’m not sure but I don’t believe delegate can take multiple attributes (I tried to look this up but for some reason couldn’t find the documentation for this method and didn’t have time to dig in the code)

You could do the following:

include the Ruby Extension Forwardable in the parent model class


include Forwardable


and then add this line:

def_delegators :profile, :first_name, :last_name, :some_other_attribute


So yeah that was my little ah ha moment. I am sure there are even better ways than this but this was better than what we were looking at doing to begin with.

Hello Ladies,
I am reporting from RailsConf 2008. The main focus of this post is logistics for the conference. I’ll be posting about the talks as soon as I get to attend one. I have been running around trying to take care of DevChix related stuff.

We were unable to get an official room for a BoF but I have decided we will just take over some area of the convention center. Lets meet outside Exhibit Hall E at 7:30 on Saturday night. We can discuss whatever we want to. We are also planning appetizers and cocktails after the BoF. Hashrocket Inc, the company I work for is sponsoring the evening. Thanks Hashrocket!

Please either come to the BoF for more information or find one of the ladies with a DevChix logo on their badges for more information. I will also have stickers to give out (until they run out).

We would love to meet ALL the women developers at the conference so please come out and get to know us.

Cheers
Desi

Hello All,
I just wanted to let folks know that if they want to make any contributions to our organization we now have a donate button over on the left side bar of the site. We will be using all money that we receive for organizational purposes. At the end of the year we will be sending out statements to anyone who makes a donation so that you can claim your donation on your taxes. Additionally, if anyone is curious what the funds go to, we will be glad speak with you personally to let you know exactly what they are planned for or are used for. We truly appreciate all the support we get.

Cheers
The DevChix

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to meet Ligaya Turmelle one of the founders of PHPWomen and then last week we meet up for dinner. The conversation flowed so well that 4 hours passed in what seemed to be mere minutes. We had so much in common with how our organizations came about, with all of the hopes and dreams we have for women in software development, and so much more. We decided that our goals were aligned so well that we should create an affiliation between our two organizations in hopes of creating a stronger support network for all women. So I am very pleased to announce that we have formed an alliance. Hopefully this alliance will help both our organizations. We look forward to supporting, helping, and working our sisters over at PHPWomen

So we were having an issue with haml and using a text-area output. It had indentation when it should not have and double indented after doing a save. A quick google search brought me to Ray Morgan’s Blog for the answer. Basically instead of using the = sign use a ~ and it will preserve whitespace. Thanks Ray. I am posting it here so I will remember where to find it if/when I forget what the answer was in the future.