Posts filed under 'Professional'
Having come from a life in show business where I was judged daily on the most superficial terms, I’m not readily angered or upset by sexist stupid shit.
There’s just so much of it. Everywhere. That I choose to ignore it.
“…Wut?”, I hear you say.
But here’s where I’m coming from. I have a great deal of respect for the women who are fighting the good fight head on. But that doesn’t work for me. I just don’t win in those situations.
Instead I choose to just be a positive example. Yeah, I guess that’s a passive agressive way of bringing folks to task. But focussing on all the negativity just brings me down. I don’t want to talk about all the things the boys won’t let me do. I don’t want to talk about all the things the boys tell me I’m supposed to be.
All I wanna do is ignore the haters and write awesome code.
But. I think I’ve been naive.
I keep hearing about stuff. Bad stuff. I mean, like the whole Sqoot thing right here in Boston. What year is this? Have ya’all been living under a rock? You can’t get away with that shit anymore. Or can you?
Now, at first I liked the whole bro-gramming meme. To me, it seemed like it started out as a self deprecating joke amongst the hipsters. Hell, I wanted to be a “bro” myself. Seemed like fun. But now, I think the fear is that it’s more of a battle cry to round up fresh tech talent from a pool of jerks.
Well, okay… if you wanna hire assholes then go ahead and add this to your adjective list along with ‘rockstar’, ‘ninja’ and ‘jedi’. But honestly, some guys are taking this bro-grammer thing to heart.
For the last three months, I’ve worked in a startup incubator space. I can stand up and see five or more separate companies with their own personalities all around me. The majority of folks are *wonderful*. And I’ve loved being in such an energized, youthful place.
But then you have your bros. The guys who stand up and pace, talking loudly on their headsets. The ones who throw around terms like ‘gangbang’ and ‘bitch’ to their male colleagues, ignoring the fact that they’re offending people sitting not three feet away.
Oh, and here’s the kicker. One of them upon learning that I was a developer said, “Wow. You’re a girl programmer? You should use that to your advantage.”
Honestly, most if the time I would let a comment like that go. But when weighed against everything else…
So, what do I do about it? What’s my responsibility here? There’s no HR department to complain to.
Honestly, do I need to do anything? These guys are alienating everyone around them. They’re not making the smart, necessary connections within the startup community that they need because men and women alike can’t stand them.
I will personally go out of my way to continue being an awesome rails dev with awesome rails dev friends and encourage them *not* to join “that startup”. And I have faith that they will implode and fail, and look like an ass doing so without my calling them out publicly to people who already hate them.
Ack, I’m back to being passive aggressive.
April 27th, 2012
Via the railsbridge free ruby on rails workshops for women (men are included if they can bring along a female), “the sarah’s” Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei have inspired me to take action here in Boston where I led a similar workshop at Harvard and am planning another workshop (yet to be announced) this May.
In addition, their work has extended to creating workshops for kids AND they have inspired many folks to consider offering childcare when putting together events which just helps everyone be awesome.
This sort of inclusive work is great for everyone in our community. That’s why I’ve nominated them for the Ruby Hero Awards again this year. Shouldn’t you?
Click here: http://rubyheroes.com/
March 14th, 2012
Been suffering a great deal of pain regarding authentication this fall due to the recent OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS migration at Facebook. As of October 1st, it has become a requirement to use OAuth2 authentication. And throughout the month of October, our recent migration from Authlogic to Devise has been funky.
On November 2nd, OmniAuth announced a major 1.0 release which should provide better support for Facebook authentication moving forward. And as of November 10th, Devise officially supports the new OmniAuth release. Unfortunately, the facebook strategy for OmniAuth 1.0 is still in the release candidate phase. The docs say that it will be officially release when OmniAuth 1.0 is released, but that was a week ago.
The upgrade went fairly easily but I still have to jump through hoops to get my facebook application to play nice. For example, if your users are playing at the library and require that one user logs out and another logs in you run into some trouble. The old session simply doesn’t clear out unless you take matters in to your own hands a log out the old session.
You can’t just clear_sesson! before you authenticate the new user, and sign_out @user doesn’t do the job either. I had to jump into the js and grab the session change event (auth.authResponseChange):
FB.Event.subscribe('auth.authResponseChange', function(response) {
if (response.status == "connected") {
$.ajax({
url: "/members/sign_out"
});
}
});
In addition, I have to check whether this is a new install. A new install of the game means you’re going to get a permissions pop up that pops you out of the facebook iframe. So I’m making the assumption that if you are asking for a new permission, it isn’t likely that I need to sign you out of an old session which leads to pop out hell. But that assumption doesn’t hold up at the library.
Now, there’s a little param that I just happened upon that you can call in the devise initializer called :iframe => true:
onfig.omniauth :github, 'APP_ID', 'APP_SECRET', :scope => 'user,public_repo', :client_options => {:ssl => {:ca_path => '/etc/ssl/certs'}, :iframe => true}
But I haven’t had much success using it. And two days ago I ran across this quote:
“I originally wrote in the functionality for “iframe => true” to break out of the iframe but I haven’t used it in quite a while and, considering v1.0, I don’t really know what it has evolved to.”
So, it’s still a work in progress. Things still mysteriously stop and start working which just convinces me that the FaceBook folks are still tweaking the API. I’m hoping that things will settle down now that we’re over a month out from this major FB change. Fingers crossed.
November 14th, 2011
Long time no blog. Since RailsConf, I’ve been A) Working my tail off at my new job B) finding a new place to live C) reminding my children that they do have a mommy
A) Has been fun and incredibly challenging. But while working at home is amazing, it means I work a lot B) took a lot more time and effort than I ever could have imagined so that there hasn’t been much time for C). So all other endeavors have been on hold.
But now it’s fall and with the change of seasons comes a renewed passion for picking up old projects. I have better sense now than to attempt to watch and blog every single Railscasts episode (unless someone locks me in a closet for a week….which would be awesome). So instead I’m just gonna share a tidbit from work. Hopefully it’ll help someone out.
I recently ripped out Authlogic and implemented Devise at work. I used the Rails 3.0 app using Devise + Omniauth example on github as a guide. And thanks to StackOverflow, I came out relatively unscathed. But I did find one edge case that might interest someone.
We were getting this error:
NoMethodError (undefined method `serialize_into_session' for Symbol:Class):
And after a little debugging came to realize that we had user_tokens with no matching user. (There’s database integrity for ya). Fortunately, it’s a quick fix in app/controllers/members/omniauth_callbacks_controller.rb. You just need to add authentication.user.present?.
authentication = UserToken.find_by_provider_and_uid(omniauth['provider'], omniauth['uid'])
if authentication && authentication.user.present?
flash[:notice] = I18n.t "devise.omniauth_callbacks.success", :kind => omniauth['provider']
sign_in_and_redirect(:user, authentication.user)
#sign_in_and_redirect(authentication.user, :event => :authentication)
else
...
end
September 29th, 2011
So at the start of railsconf this year, I saw a bit of whining over the twitterz and heard many complaints about the number of women at the conference.
What a shame that there was only one woman speaking. Isn’t it a pity? Why couldn’t the sponsors do more? Blah, blah, blah.
Well personally, I’m glad. …I mean… I’m not exactly *glad*…. I do my part organizing Railsbridge events (time for another one in Boston, eh?) and putting together a bi-monthly study group and encouraging any woman who shows interest to pursue one of the best careers in the world.
But I’m happy to have been in the super minority at my very first railsconf this year. Know why? Because….
I STICK OUT
Ladies! You have a unique opportunity to stick out in a sea of men who are themselves fighting to differentiate themselves from each other.
And you get to see (and I’m stealing this from @sandimetz) the “Secret Life of Boys”. What they do when they are amongst themselves and let their hair down. Their truly geeky, silly, wonderful selves who are at their core more insecure than we are.
Yes, there should be more women at the conference. Yes, it would be a better world if tech were less male and more balanced. But instead of lamenting about the women who are not there, rejoice in the fact that YOU are there. And you STICK OUT.
I LOVE sticking out! I do it on purpose! I wear lipstick every day and I’m not afraid to introduce myself and start a conversation with anyone around me and I believe in myself and my technical abilities and I’m happy to talk honestly with you about it.
Sticking out makes me AWESOME. It’s only one of the reasons I am awesome but I am not ashamed to proclaim my awesomeness. I have worked hard for many years to become awesome.
This week, @coreyhaines said “You have to practice to be awesome”. So true. It takes practice.
Notice he didn’t say it takes mad development skillz to be awesome. Mad development skillz do not make you awesome.
No, really.
What I mean to say is, everybody is practicing to be awesome. And yes, it’s important to build your skillset to be taken seriously in this crowd. But don’t let your perceived lack of mad development skillz deter you from participating. It’s only through participating with others that you build on your skillset and become an awesome developer.
Sure, it helps to have contributed important work to open source at an event like this. But that’s not necessarily what distinguishes you in a crowd of people who are all mostly uber technical and trying to prove to anyone who will listen to them blather on and on about the importance of testing, how awesome they are.
Sticking out gets you noticed. It is awesome to be noticed because you end up making connections that you wouldn’t have otherwise. And ladies, even if you are not trying to… you stick out. Embrace that! Take advantage of that!
Guess what? The ruby on rails community is full of guys trying to be awesome. These guys want to see you succeed. Because that’s awesome!
Don’t be afraid to talk to them. They are more afraid of talking to you! And they want so desperately to talk to you. And to help you. And to support you. They really do. But they need you to make the first move.
It is NOT awesome to melt into the background.
It is NOT awesome to hang out only with your coworkers.
It IS awesome when you introduce yourself to the someone sitting next to you.
It IS awesome to venture over to bohconf and ask someone you don’t know a question.
(And that advice goes to some of you guys as well.)
At the same time, I need to give you some important advice that I learned in my youth as a professional actor in New York City.
TO BE AWESOME,
YOU NEED TO BE YOURSELF.
But you need to be the super you. Not the shy you but the happy you. The you that you are when you are relaxed with your closest friends. And guess what? That you is enough.
I spent years and years in New York trying to be what agents and casting directors and Broadway legends want me to be. That was FUCKED UP. Because to be a success in life, all I needed to be was myself.
If you decide to chuck coding and become a professional actor. This is the lesson you will hear time and time again:
You are ENOUGH
Please let that sink in a little as I shout that at you again.
YOU ARE ENOUGH
Just as you are right now, you are awesome. You are awesome if but for the mere fact that you are one of a mere 2.7% who came to railsconf and you stick out. THAT IS AWESOME!
May 20th, 2011
Sadly, I did not complete all of Ryan Bates’ Railscast videos before Railsconf ’11. I didn’t even get close.
It was a great idea that I simply couldn’t complete. But that doesn’t mean it has to die.
Through the conference this year there was a definite theme. And I’m not talking about javascript. @benscofield gave an ignite talk where he said, the way to be awesome is to:
START LOTS OF STUFF
Now, I am awesome. And I am awesome at starting lots of great stuff. And sometimes I finish it too. Particularly, if there is the possibility that I may be fired if I don’t. But @benscofield also said:
QUIT ON STUFF
You have to Know Your Limits as @eliseworthy said. And since @briandoll pointed out that the ultimate productivity hack is having kids, I’ve decided to take this project in a new direction.
It’s no fun practicing being awesome alone. So I propose a monthly meet-up where we watch a Railscast screencast together and discuss it afterwards.
Who’s in?
May 20th, 2011
My first railsconf was a wild blur of code, sushi, new friends and t-shirts. You can check out my conference tweets here. But with the keynotes being livestreamed and the sessions being mostly hit or miss, the clear stand out for me was @bohconf.
If you can’t afford a ticket next year (and lord knows that it’ll take that long for me to pay off this year’s trip), then save your dough and just sign up for @bohconf. Really, you won’t regret it.
@bohconf was created by local Baltimore ruby group folk who created a space where devs could meet up and hack together with geek snacks and t-shirts readily available. This is where I hung out with @sandimetz, @BlueBoxRenee, and @narwen chit chatting about Sandi’s work on her new book and learning more about best practices than I would if I had attended some of the sessions I was missing.
It was a safe space where devs of all levels were sitting at tables learning new stuff and coding together in peace and harmony. And all the rockstars made an appearance at one point or another.
I complimented one on his oh-so-FAB yoda packpack before I realized it was @coreyhaines just practicing being awesome. …And while I was banging away at some mysterious problem installing mysql with homebrew, @wayneeseguin sat down beside me and hijacked my computer installing redis and mysql using his new project called BDSM. Beat that system into submission, baby!
I know there are some who will consider the lewd reference unfortunate. Get over yourself. You can’t get much sillier than a penguin in a corset and @wayneeseguin and I traded ridiculous innuendos while giggling like we were in jr. highschool.
And this is how I ended up going to dinner with the inventor of RVM, the organizer of MoutainWest RubyConf and a senior member of my favorite consulting company of which I am a major fangirl. Srsly, @bohconf rocks.
But since I had sacrificed a trip to the Bahamas with my girlfriends to afford my conference ticket, I felt an obligation to attend all the sessions on Testing, Scaling, Redis and Javascript to get my money’s worth. I came to railsconf specifically to level up my skills, so I decided to pass on the more visionary talks by the usual suspects.
I appreciate that you have strong opinions on the direction of our framework. And there are lots of folks who want to hear those opinions. But honestly, I just want to look at code. And I want you to explain that code to me with context and examples. So that when I’m alone with my laptop, I’m not googling for blog posts but rather I have enough exposure to a new concept that I can work it through myself.
So my favorite tutorial was the Rails Best Practices presentation. I realize that they were selling a new product that had been well polished before arriving at the conference, but this tutorial from Envy Labs was the best technical presentation I have ever attended. @greggpollack is a great speaker and I fully appreciated his vintage Atari game references. Check out railsbest.com to level up your Ruby on Rails best practices. Sure, you have to pay to play, but I promise it’s worth it.
And tied for favorite session are two talks that I saw on the last day back to back. Both were code heavy in a new technology for me but gave me a strong base to go off on my own and learn more.
Indexing Thousands of Writes Per Second with Redis from @pauldix will help bring me up to speed on something that I’m going to use this morning. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that he took five minutes to go over the basics of Redis and what it does before talking about the advanced topics. Thank you, Paul. …And by the way, you look hot in a suit.
Building Pageless Apps with Rails and Backbone.js from@mkelly12 was hilarious and chock full of code. For example:
Javascript === Ke$ha
Javascript is a lot like Ke$ha. At first, you’re like WTF? But then you realize that:
function () {} === lambda {}
And Ke$ha is just a vessel for vomiting glitter and baby unicorns.
Honestly, this talk flew by me so fast that I felt like I was run over by those baby unicorns…. but if they could just circle back a couple of times then I think that I too could vomit glitter. I *really* hope that this talk ends up on the net somewhere.
But I wouldn’t be true to my #glee roots if I didn’t mention @aslpeenic (a gentleman and a funny bastard) and the music jam on Wednesday night where everyone participated at varying levels of musical talent. Honestly, I really wish I had contributed to the github setlist with a few Journey or Pat Benatar tunes. I did get a chance to wail on Proud Mary in the wrong key, but next year I’ll have more tunes in my backpocket.
So, I’m actually quite grateful to my delayed flight that has allowed me to finish up this blog post before returning back to real life. Srsly, I felt like I was 20 again in New York City with so many exciting things to experience and discover that you just can’t take it all in. Which is fun… but exhausting.
May 20th, 2011
I’m working with very old versions of prototype and scriptaculous, and for the most part it’s not a problem. Our needs are simple. An autocomplete here, a drag and drop there. No biggie.
But I need to incorporate a drag and drop feature on an existing table. No problem! We got sortable ordered lists all over the app. Only, sorting an ordered list is a different thing than sorting table rows. Or is it?
Well, having fought with it for some time I was ready to give up when Google search revealed that there’s some sort of bug with scriptacuous sortable_element function and tables.
Well, poo!
I didn’t want to trhow in third party plugins like Tablekit and was instead just about to implement a link at the bottom of the table to a lightbox that would display the data in an ordered list. *sigh* Not a bad workaround, but it made me sad.
I was so sad, I decided to learn a little more about this sortable_element function. http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/ScriptaculousHelper.html#method-i-sortable_element Unsurprisingly, the helper documentation doesn’t offer up much. I mean, now that I know that answer I understand the documentation. But it’s supposed to work the other way around, isn’t it?
So, my last effort was to see if I could find if this bug had been reported. I’ve had great luck finding workarounds and forming alternative ideas from conversations via lighthouse tickets and so my search brought me here:
The interesting bit about this ticket is that subimage provides a workaround that sounds a bit like intended behavior to me. Better yet, he provides examples that got me up and running.
So, below is a simplified version of my now working sortable table:
apps/views/files/tableofiles.rhtml
<table>
<thead>
<tr><th>Handle</th><th>Name</th><th>Date</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
"row", :collection => @files) %>
</tbody>
</table>
{ :action => "sort_my_table"},
:tag => "TR",
:handle => "TD.drag",
:dropOnEmpty => true,
:containment => ['sortable_body'],
:ghosting => true,
:constraint => :vertical) %>
apps/views/files/_row.rhtml
<tr id='file_'>
<td class='drag'>[drag]</td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
apps/controllers/files_controller.rb
def sort_my_table
priorities = params[:sortable_body].collect { |f| File.find(f) }.reverse
priorities.each_with_index{|f, index| f.update_attribute('priority', index + 1) unless f.priority == index+1}
render :nothing => true
end
So, it’s implemented, it works, it looks pretty… but wait. Was what that about a bug? … I go back to research for this blog post. In the documentation for Sortable.create:
Notes
Important: You can use Sortable.create on any container element that contains Block Elements, with the exception of TABLE, THEAD, TBODY and TR. This is a technical restriction with current browsers.
A sortable nested somewhere inside a table won’t work well under IE unless the table has a “position:relative” style. If you use the css display: table property, sortable lists will work a little, but doesn’t allow true drag and drop of the elements.
So, does my new feature work in IE? According to these docs, using tbody as container and TR as the sortables will work in IE6 (pc) and Firefox (mac/pc). But my clients are using IE7. Since it appears that the bug was reported in December 2009 and there has been no action on it, I’m going to guess no one cares. Freaking legacy code.
Back to my lightbox hack… Freaking IE. *sigh*
April 15th, 2011
Come join us in our quest to hone our Ruby on Rails skills! Using Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial as our textbook, we will work chapter by chapter building our skills together.
Meetings will be held every-other-week on Wednesday evenings starting at 6:30 pm. and will last approximately 2 hrs. RBM Technologies has graciously donated meeting space. Attendees will chip in to buy a communal dinner. Non-alcoholic drinks will be provided, but feel free to bring your own beverage of choice.
The next meeting will be held at RBM Technologies on March 16th, 6:30 pm, 215 First Street, Cambridge, MA 02142 on the first floor across from the entrance to Technique. The information desk can assist if you have problems finding the office.
RBM Technogliges is a short walk from either the Lechmere or Kendall T-stations. On street parking is tight but sometimes you will get lucky. The Cambridgeside Galleria parking lot is closeby and very affordable after 5pm.
Attendees should have read/studied and completed Chapter 1 & 2 before the next meeting. We will start with Chapter 3. Bring your laptop, a hard copy of the book if you own one, and your enthusiasm.
The Ruby on Rails Study Group for Women is being coordinated by Liana Leahy, liana@liana.org, and Susan McM. Tucker, smtucker@prettycoolsolutions.com
Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested.
March 7th, 2011
Friday night, I attended the Opensource Womens Leadership Summit held by RailsBridge and sponsored by PivotalLabs honoring women who over the past two years have volunteered their time to the Ruby on Rails Workshops for Women.
The workshop project has trained almost 600 people, nearly 500 of them women, in five cities in learning how to develop web applications using the popular Ruby on Rails framework. The project bridges the gap from aspiring developer to contributing open source community member through mentoring, teaching and writing.
Sarah Allen, Sarah Mei, Desi McAdams and myself were on a panel to talk about our involvement with the project and past workshops. I have never been so honored than to be included in a group with these women. They are well respected coders and leaders in the ror community. These are my role models and it was uber awesome to have the opportunity to hang out with these ladies.
So, as crazy busy as my life is with a full time developer job, side projects, meetups and two toddlers, I can’t help but be inspired to hold at least one more workshop out here in Boston this year. Plans are still fuzzy, but I’m thinking early May before RailsConf. Ping me at @lleahy if you’d be interested in helping out.
January 31st, 2011
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