This week on My Ruby Story, Charles speaks with Allison McMillan. Allison is a software developer at Collective Idea, a software consulting company that solves real-world software problems. Allison is very excited about working on a number of projects and learning new things in the development world. Allison was a recent guest on Ruby Rogues and will be a speaker at Ruby Dev Summit coming up on October 16-21, 2017. In this episode we learn more about Allison’s journey as a startup founder, to make a career change to a developer, all while and making a name in the dev community and gaining a dev job. Allison talks about her involvement and contributions to the Ruby community. In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

• Allison got into programming working as a non-profit executive and dealing with change in the organization.
• Getting in involve  in the DC Tech Community 
• Joining the Rails Girls Workshop
• Got her first job by attending the Ruby Conf. at the Scholar Guide Program
• Working Remotely as a junior developer
• Doing light talks at Ruby Conf. to gain authority
• Allison mentions doing conference speaking and organizing as apart of contributing to the Ruby community
• Allison’s favorite thing to speak about at conferences involves writing interactive workshops.

Links:

• DC Tech Community 
• Rails Girls
• http://rubyconf.org/scholarships
• Blog site - DayDreams In Ruby
• @allie_p
• Ruby Dev Summit  - Free

Picks:  Allison

• Hello Ruby by Linda Liukas
• Baking - SmittenKitchen

Charles

• GitLab Server
• MatterMost