How the Principles of Ruby Inspired the Rails Girls Community

This is a joint talk Linda Liukas and I gave at RubyConf Taiwan 2014.

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9voOUTuAlQI

Rails Girls started in Helsinki in 2010 with very humble beginnings. It’s now a community thriving in 180 cities around the world. Ruby and its community has influenced Rails Girls from the start and every step of the way. During our talk we’ll go through a history of Rails Girls, tell various anecdotes, and explore:

* Scaling human connections
* Removing single points of failures
* The difficulty of the first steps
* How launching is easy, but maintenance is a harder
* Managing quality as the community grows
* Software is built by humans
* Friday Hugs!
* Memories

Transcript

1. How the Principles of Ruby Inspired the Rails Girls Community
2. Story told in 4 Acts...
3. Linda Liukas Writer of children’s books.
5. Helsinki, Finland
6. #lindaing
7. Terence Lee Friday Hug Super Hero
9. Act I. Rails Girls Origins
10. The first workshop came from my interest in learning Rails. Never intended to be global.
14. Jason Ong from Singapore e-mails us. Never been to Singapore!
16. The influences on first workshops?
17. Open source.
18. Excitement.
19. Create “Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I’m not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.” - Yukihiro Matsumoto, “Matz”, まつもとゆきひろ
20. Planning Berlin. 75 attendees. Largest event at the time.
22. We met in Berlin...
23. Coaching my first event. Captivated by the... Positive Energy. Passion. Desire to learn.
24. Railsberry (Krakow)
25. Open Source the Guides. Github used to distribute. Running your own event is now accessible.
26. Inspiring people at Railsberry. Now there was actionable items people could take away.
28. Amsterdam. Paris. San Francisco. Helsinki. Melbourne. Los Angeles. Miami.
29. Act II. Rails Girls Practices
30. “I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed to make programming not only easy but also fun. It allows you to concentrate on the creative side of programming, with less stress.” - Yukihiro Matsumoto, “Matz”, まつもとゆきひろ
32. Approachable for women and all groups, ages, genders. Fun. Welcoming. Community of like minded people
33. Also approachable to the existing Ruby Community
34. It’s about the people.
35. Coaches’ Dinner
36. After parties can be used help to bridge the community. Rubyists are nice and friendly.
37. Become a part of the Ruby community.
38. Have you ever wanted to give up after being frustrated?
39. Every time someone needs to ask for help, it’s an opportunity to stop.
40. Teach people how to google for answers.
41. Require laptops because installing Ruby/Rails is hard.
42. Easy to get lost in the details. Always come back to the big picture.
43. Teach the lingo. Pull request CSS Agile HTML
44. BentoBox
53. Focus on doing over long lectures. Give people those magic moments.
54. Attendees should leave excited about the tech industry.
55. Act III. Ruby’s Influences
56. “Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world.” - Rumi
57. Language has a grammar. But it also has a culture. It shapes the way we experience world.
58. Amateur “No one in 1993 would have believed that an object- oriented language created by a Japanese amateur language designer would end up being used worldwide and that the language would become almost as popular as Perl.” - Yukihiro Matsumoto, “Matz”, まつもとゆきひろ
59. Rails Girls created by non-programmers. A designer. A business student dropout.
60. Design is important. Good design makes the event more approachable.
62. Ruby could be understood outside of Japan because of accessible documentation like the Pickaxe
63. documenting how to run an event made it possible for events to be thrown all over the world
64. ..active mailing list, event page, Twitter for recruitment and pull requests.
65. Open Source Culture. Use Github to get outside contributions. Mostly pull requests.
66. Ruby has a standard library of reusable libraries to make it easier to build common programs out of the box.
67. Providing a guide along with presentation materials that can be used lowers the barrier to entry of hosting an event.
69. Ruby is Flexible “Ruby has been described as a multi-paradigm programming language: it allows procedural programming (defining functions/variables outside classes makes them part of the root, 'self' Object), with object orientation (everything is an object) or functional programming (it has anonymous functions, closures, and continuations; statements all have values, and functions return the last evaluation). It has support for introspection,reflection and metaprogramming, as well as support for interpreter-based[43] threads. Ruby features dynamic typing, and supports parametric polymorphism.”
70. (1..10).map {|i| i + 1 } (1..10).collect do |i| i + 1 end
71. Unlike Python, Ruby doesn’t have PEPs or the one true way to do something. Ruby encourages creativity.
72. Guides are just a starting point.
73. Each chapter has ownership of their own event. And sometimes they come up with amazing things.
75. Coaches have their own teaching styles and can focus and cater the content based on the needs of the students.
76. Trust is at the core.
78. Letting go “The future starts now. We have the second edition of Programming Ruby, which is better than the first one. It’s no longer a miracle. This time, the grown-up Ruby community helped to develop the book. I just needed to sit and watch the community working together.” - Yukihiro Matsumoto, “Matz”, まつもとゆきひろ
79. Letting go. Don’t suffocate it. Things get done when you aren’t there.
80. 180 cities to date
81. Act IV. Closing & Memories
82. “I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.” - Yukihiro Matsumoto, “Matz”, まつもとゆきひろ
83. Community Effort “I almost feel like Ruby is one of my children, but in fact, it is the result of the combined efforts of many people. Without their help, Ruby could never have become what it is.” - Yukihiro Matsumoto, “Matz”, まつもとゆきひろ
84. Rails Girls as a community is very different from other learning communities (like school). Here’s how.
85. Roles change. Beginners and more advanced people can teach one another.
86. Many different ways to participate. You can be peripheral in some ways, central in others.
87. Everyone can produce and not just consume. Content is changed by interaction.
88. Leadership is porous and leaders are resources.
89. Courage “I always admire brave people. People around Ruby seem to be brave, like the authors of this book. They were brave to jump in to a relatively unknown language like Ruby. They were brave to try new technology. They could have happily stayed with an old technology, but they didn’t. They built their own world using new bricks and mortar. They were adventurers, explorers, and pioneers. By their effort, we have a fruitful result—Ruby.” -Matz
90. Universe “Now, I feel that I’ve created my own universe with help from those brave people. At first, I thought it was a miniature universe, like the one in “Fessenden’s Worlds.” But now it seems like a real universe. Countless brave people are now working with Ruby. They challenge new things every day, trying to make the world better and bigger. I am very glad I am part of the Ruby world.” - Yukihiro Matsumoto, “Matz”, まつもとゆきひろ
92. Friday Hug Memories
93. Helsinki
94. Sofia
95. San Francisco
96. Friday Hug?
97. Ruby is focused on humans “Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. “ - Matz
99. Inspire. Create. Explore.
100. Bye now. I will wait you in the future. Yes, I'm living in the future. -Matz.