Ruby Rogues

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:

Links:

Picks: 

Allison

Charles

• How to Learn Machine Learning?
• Important hardware components: GPU, RAM, etc. 
• Training
• Algorithms that are doing once impossible things
• Building a machine learning system for different kind of tasks or applications
• Decide on a side project and completing a side project

• Marc-André Cournoyer
• The Great Code Club
• CoreLogic
• twitter.com/macournoyer
• Thin Web Server 
• TinyRB
• Create your own Programming Language
• http://refactormycode.com
• http://talkerapp.com
• CodedInc

• Code Sponsors

• MX Master 2S
• Uninterruptible power supply

• Ruby Dev Summit
• Home Depot 
• Mini-Excavators
• Data Skeptic Podcast 

• Rebuilding a Ruby Web Server from Scratch 
• Arxiv-Sanity

• How to Learn Machine Learning?
• Important hardware components: GPU, RAM, etc. 
• Training
• Algorithms that are doing once impossible things
• Building a machine learning system for different kind of tasks or applications
• Decide on a side project and completing a side project

• Marc-André Cournoyer
• The Great Code Club
• CoreLogic
• twitter.com/macournoyer
• Thin Web Server 
• TinyRB
• Create your own Programming Language
• http://refactormycode.com
• http://talkerapp.com
• CodedInc

• Code Sponsors

• MX Master 2S
• Uninterruptible power supply

• Ruby Dev Summit
• Home Depot 
• Mini-Excavators
• Data Skeptic Podcast 

• Rebuilding a Ruby Web Server from Scratch 
• Arxiv-Sanity

Jason Swett is a former Ruby Rogues panelist and the author of Angular on Rails. He's also a contractor and corporate trainer.

Jason and Chuck dive into Jason's story getting into programming, Ruby, and talk about his current and past ventures in entrepreneurship. We also talk about writing courses and ebooks and blog posts.

Links:

Picks

Jason:

Chuck

• Tools that you can use to scan for vulnerabilities or add more security checks to your applications
• Authentication and authorization mistakes
• Securely managing data
• and much, much more...

• secureheaders
• brakeman
• Code Climate
• CloudFlare
• zxcvbn
• Troy Hunt article on pwned passwords
• Devise Security Extension
• pundit
• Drifting Ruby episode on Complex Strong Parameters
• gemnasium
• bundler-audit
• OWASP Zed Attack Proxy Project
• rack-attack

• Regex 101
• Give and Take by Adam Grant

• Indie Hackers

• Sumo Logic

• Ready Player One Comic-Con trailer breakdown
• Mattermost
• Ruby Rogues Parley
• Ruby Dev Summit (FREE)

• Webpacker 3.0
• ActiveStorage
• Heroku

Today’s episode is a My Ruby Story with Ruberto Paulo. He is going to be speaking in the Ruby Dev Summit in October. Listen to learn more about Rub!

[01:10] – Introduction to Ruberto Paulo

Rob is a programmer in Cape Town, South Africa. He’s been programming in Ruby for the last 6 years. He has also been quite in different areas of business from sales, manufacturing, to teaching. He has also spoken on one of the Ruby conferences in South Africa this year. And he’s going to be speaking in Ruby Dev Summit in October.

At one stage, programming for Rob was quite a painful experience. You can get stuck in doing normal projects, eventually, you’d lose the light that you found. The talk is about Date Night with Ruby. That’s the title of the talk. It’s really about what can we do to re-ignite that fire with Ruby? We’re going to take a look at the language as if it’s a person.

[05:15] – How did you get into programming?

Rob’s dad had a laptop that was running MS-DOS. At the time, it was navigating using a keyboard. There was no mouse. Eventually, he was teaching the whole family how to use it. His uncle also had an old Intel 80486. He set up every component and reconnected them. Eventually, the box started working. He always had this fascination with technology.

During high school, Rob used the language Delphi. He also learned Excel and Word. A couple of his friends, would spend their weekends in his friend’s garage and hack out programs. The final project for their final year, they have to bring in a project and then explain to the class its value. He and his friends used to go to internet cafes and play computer games. So, they ended up doing writing software and tutorials for these internet cafes. After 6 months of hacking up this project, the internet café used their software. Those applications became 16,000 lines long because they didn’t have the good practice that we have today.

Rob also started teaching. When he was teaching one night, a friend came up and said, “Hey, have you heard about Ruby?” That’s his journey into Ruby actually started. He said that they're looking for a couple brand new developers and if you can write two programs just to test and give them back to him on Monday, they'll see if they have a position for him. He went home and typed into Google: “How to Learn Ruby”. He found a book and read it. He did the 2 tests. The first test was the Animal Test. It was more around design. How do you create new animals if you want to do different things? It’s about inheritance. How could you give abilities to the other objects? The second one was a technical question about the relation, how to sort this array. He passed these tests and started the next Friday. That was probably around late 2010.

[15:45] – What is it about Ruby?

Rub thinks that you can make Ruby as complicated or as easy. In the most recent Ruby Weekly, there was somebody that rewrote portions of Ruby so that it can look like JavaScript. You can mold it to whatever you want. Write it as close as a natural language as you can because you’re going to be looking at a language a lot more than you’re going to be writing it. If you can pick up what’s going on in this step, that’s going to be a big leap forward. So, the big part of it is that Ruby is very natural. It reads like English. You can pick up what it’s going to be doing.

Picks

Ruberto Paulo

Charles Max Wood

• Prioritizing your family and still having a great career
• Goal setting, focus, and growth
• Team collaboration
• Contributing to open source
• and much, much more...

• Delayed Job
• Allison's Blog
• Baby Driven Development talk
• Rails Girls
• Ruby Dev Summit
• RSpec
• Minitest
• RailsCasts
• Interactor Gem
• Leah Silber from Tilde tweet
• Tilde article on Baby at Work
• Mother Coders
• RailsBridge
• Allison on Twitter

• Gallup Strengths Test
• Metabase

• Sticky Note Game by TableXI
• WriteSpeakCode
• Ruby Jewel
• Crystal DISC Assessment

• Rails Guides

Today's episode of My Ruby Story is an interview with Eric Berry, who is our newest panelist on Ruby Rogues.

Eric is one of Chuck's friends from early in his programming career.

Eric is @coderberry on Twitter. He's been a Ruby developer for about 9 years and doing software for about 19 years.

He was hired to do HTML for a company called vLender. Eric worked in Photoshop 2 (pre-layers).

He, then, went on an LDS mission and while on his mission, he built a system to track the cars and assets for the mission.

Then, his brother moved out to Switzerland to join an eCommerce company. Eric bought a PHP book, read it, got a passport, and started showing up at his work. Eventually they hired him.

They started shifting over to Java. They coded Java with VIM.

While in Switzerland, Eric and his brother had created an app that allowed them to share photos with family back home.

His brother raised funds and they moved to England to build up the photo sharing app.

They eventually sold shareaphoto.com to HP. Eric jokes that this was his "college."

9/11 hit and Eric's brother moved back to the states. Eric stayed for another 2 years, then moved to Las Vegas.

He was a residential appraiser for about 4 years. While there, he built some software to help the company.

Eric took a pay cut from $180,000 to $65,000 per year to go back to software.

He and his wife eventually moved back to Utah and got a job working for AtTask (now Workfront)

Eric and one of his co-workers went out and created projects with Django and Rails. They both loved Rails.

Eric was using Rails at AtTask in the marketing department and spent a ton of time figuring out how to deploy Rails with mongrel.

Eric has also worked for Omniture (acquired by Adobe), Instructure, and One-on-One Marketing.

Initially, Eric created Teach Me to Code as an homage to Ryan Bates from RailsCasts.

Eric left his mistakes and fumbling in. He got feedback from people that liked that it showed how to debug and figure out issues.

Chuck came in to create content for Teach Me to Code.

Eric's company and focus moved to Groovy on Grails which prompted him to hand the series off to Chuck.

Eric mentions Chuck's tenacity.

Teach Me to Code is a large part of Chuck's journey into podcasting.

Eric has been building other people's businesses for about 20 years. He's done all kinds of projects at all levels.

He doesn't want to continue on a path where he doesn't participate in the end result of the project.

Eric tried out AdWords. It'll pay off in 2-5 years, but he has not passion for it.

Eric loves programming and developers and wanted to do something that served them.

Open Source is starting to have problems with sustainability.

People are building their businesses on top of software that's maintained by 1-2 developers. These folks have a day job and aren't paid to write their open source software.

The get a bunch of requests for help and that workload doesn't go away. Then they get burned out.

Then you have the "no longer maintained" notices on projects that you're using.

Codesponsor solves this problem by bringing marketing into the picture to put some money into the developers' pockets and gives them some validation for what they did.

Eric talks about a pay me button that Kent C. Dodds put on some of his repos. He didn't get any contributions.

The problem with corporate sponsors is that the developer feels obligated to provide unpaid support when their sponsor has a problem.

OpenCollective explained. Their biggest problem is money is not coming in.

Open Design Collective

CodeSponsor allows companies that want to get in front of developers to put non-obtrusive, subtle text ads in the README's and websites of the projects without creating the issues that come with direct sponsorship.

Mention of ReadTheDocs.org

Eric talks about Nate Hopkins and Chuck mentions that Nate Hopkins was his first mentor as a professional developer.

Eric shares a funny story about Chuck and Nate working together.

Eric

Chuck

• github.com/jwright
• twitter.com/jwright
• brilliantfantastic.com

• Rollbar

• Mattermost

• Zoho CRM

• Digit

Today's episode is a My Ruby Story with Kinsey Ann Durham. She is one of the speakers for the Ruby Dev Summit. Listen to learn more about Kinsey!

Kinsey was on episode 180 of the Ruby Rogues podcast. They talked about Barriers to New Developers. It’s been 3 years. She is also one of the speakers for the Ruby Dev Summit, which is coming up in October.

RailsBridge workshop

Kinsey got into programming, not through the traditional Computer Science route or boot camp / code school route. She actually did a RailsBridge workshop 4 or 5 years ago in Denver. RailsBridge is part of the larger organization called Bridge Foundry. It’s a weekend workshop where you have mentors and teachers who teach you how to build an app in whatever language or framework from scratch. Food is provided. It’s mainly for women but men are welcome as well as long as you accompany a female.

Brother

Kinsey’s step brother, Sean Griffin, is really big in the Rails community and Rasp community. She saw him and what he was doing.

Networking and building relationships

Kinsey was lucky enough to meet Desi McAdam at the RailsBridge event. Eventually, she was able to get a job as an apprentice in Denver that had just opened and where Desi was the managing director.

Kinsey did a lot of self-taught work using books. There are online tutorials, mentorship, and networking with people. She thinks it’s relevant for developers who are new in the industry given how saturated the market is. It’s important to network and build relationships, and not just applying blindly to Java applications that you see online.

Luckily, there are tons of online resources where you can learn and get the basics. Kinsey thinks that it’s a lot harder nowadays to do that because you will be competing for head to head with students who are coming out of these schools, or do have Computer Science backgrounds. But she also thinks that it’s doable to be self-taught as long as you are willing to put in the time. And then, not only use the free online resources but also find a mentor that is willing to work with you and guide you because there are times where you’ll hit a bug or problem or even when getting Rails setup on your machine. Sometimes, Stack Overflow and those online resources aren’t enough.

Kinsey started going to conferences right away and she fell in love with the community. Back then, there were a lot of stories going around in the industry on how hard it is for females, etc. But she found that the Ruby community was welcoming and receptive.

Kinsey had experiences and has seen it firsthand. She thinks that it is still an issue but she also thinks that it’s getting better. She thinks that the programming communities are becoming more and more diverse with the influx of people coming out of code schools. They have different backgrounds. They also have stereotypical developers.

Kinsey Ann Durham

Charles Max Woods