MRS 065: Nell Shamrell-Harrington

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Nell Shamrell-Harrington This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Nell who is a principle engineer at Chef. Check them out at Chef.Io. She also works with Operation Code. This organization helps veterans to learn code, and helps them get a technical job. Check out today’s episode where Chuck and Nell discuss Ruby, Rust, and much more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 2:00 – Chuck: Episode 105 is another episode you’ve been on before. 2:25 – Chuck: I want to spotlight you and talk about what you are working on. How did you get into programming? 2:38 – Nell: I was a theater major in college. I graduated in 2007 and the big financial crisis hit in 2008. I found work at the Physics Department in Seattle. Once they found out that I knew how to code, they gave me more coding to do. When you are doing just the mathematics portion – you don’t see how this applies to real life. I didn’t pursue it because I didn’t see how it worked in the real world. Then I saw eventually how my theater background really helped me with coding because you have to be super creative. After that (this is when I got into Ruby) my roommate in college sent me a message. She was working with Ruby, too, and she wanted to bring me on as a junior developer. 5:55 – Chuck: It’s interesting, too, to see what you just said. Not seeing the real-world application with some of that stuff. I can relate to that. I wanted to get into IT after college. The other thing is that it was someone you KNEW to get you into Ruby. People get into a specific framework because of someone that they knew/know. 6:54 – Nell: Yes, it’s the personal testimonies that help people make those decisions. 7:13 – Chuck: It was someone that you KNEW that helped you get X job. 7:24 – Nell: Yes, in Operation Code, too. Take a look at this candidate (normally you wouldn’t look at them b/c of their CV) and take a chance on them. 8:09 – Chuck: One thing that I am curious about what’s been your favorite thing to work on with Ruby? 8:38 – Nell: I worked on the supermarket product. Cookbook is a chef recipe for infrastructure... We weren’t just running a site that people were using. They were saying: we love it, but we are behind a firewall. They couldn’t use the public one and they wanted a private one. The answer was: Yes! That was the first time I worked on software – packaged and distributed. I loved the breadth of the industries that it had an affect on. It was cool to see different industries use my work through a Ruby on Rails application. Ruby does scale! 10:42 – Chuck: Let’s talk about your work at Chef. You worked on Supermarket and then what was the distributed part to it? 11:05 – Nell: Chef Omnibus was the tool we used. You could take that package and install it on the infrastructure... 11:33 – Chuck: I worked at a university for a while. The work I did was that the access to the Internet was limited. Chef would have been nice! 11:58 – Chuck: What did you do at Blue Box? 11:59 – Nell: Software engineer there and we were a hosting company. We had a Rails application... I helped write the code. 12:29 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 12:32 – Nell: I am working on a project called Habitat. Nell talks about what THIS project is and how it functions. Check it out! 14:20 – Chuck: How did you get into Operation Code? 14:26 – Nell: Both my parents were air force operators. I wanted to but I had a physical limitation so I couldn’t. I grew up in military culture from 0-14 years old. After that I realized in...