8 ms·

New Rails workshops to bring more women into the Boston software scene

50 points by telecaster 14y ago

danso 14y ago
> A good percentage of the attendees had some exposure to HTML/CSS and several had experience in PHP, Java, C and Python. Two of our students had worked as developers for mainframe computers, writing PL/I and IBM assembler. Cool initiative and I'm all for introducing more programming to everyone...but I wonder whether Rails is the best way to do it. There are many, many moving parts, least of which is the concept of MVC and then the interaction between each part of MVC...nevermind, for those who just know only HTML and CSS, the fundamentals of programming (variables, the difference between "1" and 1, loops, etc), and even how to use the command line.
- telecaster 14y ago
  I share those concerns & agree that MVC is a lot to swallow in an introductory workshop. But it's also very motivating! A lot of people want to build real websites instead of toy programs. We're trying to harness that awesome source of motivation & it seems to be working despite the drawbacks.
  - danso 14y ago
    Yeah, it's a difficult line to walk between teaching what is comprehensible and enabling people, with magic, to do something concrete, even if they know nothing about how anything works. The former bores people because it's too abstract, and the latter...well, I feel there's the risk that when there's too much magic involved, the students feel as if being a "wizard" is an inherent trait, rather than something you eventually build towards after plugging away at the fundamentals. I've toyed with teaching a workshop that entails: teach enough programming to turn a non-flat-file dataset (maybe a json of their tweets) into a decent visualization (by plugging into Google Charts, perhaps) and uploading a static page, with Twitter Bootstrap, onto a free hosting service, or even a blog service such as Wordpress. But even that is a lot to teach in a day: 1. Command line and file system basics 2. Fundamentals of programming (enough to open a JSON file, parse and aggregate it on some conditions, and spit out HTML) 3. Basic HTML and DOM, including what you need to know to 4. Basic webserver/uploading stuff Most workshops struggle with getting 3 and 4 done. #2 is not easily achievable over even several days.
- ecoffey 14y ago
  I participated in one here Boulder, CO as a TA, and yes there were a lot of moving parts, but what I think was important was not deep diving into any particular thing, but getting to the point where they have pushed a "real" app. I have a few apps of negligible utility that run out on Heroku, and they are no different than the apps Railsbridge participants built. They got to make something real, and got exposed to real tools and infrastructure.
johnleppings 14y ago
I don't understand why the gender of a programmer is relevant to anything. You are concerned that there are no enough women. Why? Why do you want more women? Why is the particular sexual organs that someone has of interest to you?
- jacobian 14y ago
  Well, I could talk about social justice and basic fairness, but the tone of your question implies that you don't see it that way. So instead, let's look at the question from a coldly calculating point of view. Let's say I have a open source project, and it's got 100 contributors (or community members, users, whatever -- the it's all the same). If my project follows today's averages, that group will be on the order of 98 men and 2 women. Let's say we work to increase our diversity such that now 50% of our community are women. How big is the community now? That's right -- 200 people. It's not like adding 50% women removes 50% men... if we increase the number of women in our community, we increase the number of people. Now I've got twice as many contributors, twice as many users, twice as much activity, etc. Open source projects live and die on the strength of their communities. Increasing diversity is often actually the easiest way to increase membership, full stop. [Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. But the point is that even if you don't give a shit about those sorts of ideals, there are still coldly calculating economy-of-scale arguments for why diversity is important.]
  - jeremyt 14y ago
    Kudos to you for the honest attempt to reframe, but I think you're just using circular logic. In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people". In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers. Therefore, it follows that per capita, it's going to be harder to bring women into the fold. To use your example, if you really wanted to increase your contributors to your open source project, you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.
vimota 14y ago
Reminiscent of LLC: http://ladieslearningcode.com/ http://ladieslearningcode.com/ I was a mentor for the Ruby class and absolutely loved the experience, students of all backgrounds were so eager to learn and understand programming.
- kookster 14y ago
  It's a wonderful thing. Folks should make this happen everywhere, in whatever language. It also was a great experience to help out with the event. In Boston there was a python workshop for women which provided much inspiration for this Ruby one: http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ There was a similar event some years ago also sponsored by the Berkman Center, with some TAs participating in both: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/2009/10/20/post-workshop-news/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/2009/10/20/post-w... And then there is the Ada Initiative, which I think is fantastic: http://adainitiative.org/ http://adainitiative.org/
- heatherpayne 14y ago
  Thanks for sharing, vimota! - Heather Payne (Founder, Ladies Learning Code)
shimon 14y ago
This is an important effort with a powerful effect on the Boston tech scene. This and similar outreach efforts (like the Python workshops) have increased diversity not just in the Python and Ruby groups, but more broadly in all tech groups. This was most noticeable at BarCamp Boston 2012, which had a lot more women participants than the previous 6 years. It's great to know that the tech community can be welcoming to all sorts of people.
- telecaster 14y ago
  Boston Python really led on the diversity outreach front in 2012, and now we (the Boston Ruby community) are very gratefully following their lead. Boston Python is so awesome.
zampano 14y ago
I've heard murmurs of a RailsGirls workshop here in Austin and I know a few of my female friends were very interested in attending when I talked to them about it. I think it's great to try to get more women involved in the industry, and while Rails is complicated enough that you can nearly guarantee most people won't walk away with any true understanding of programming, I think workshops like this can help undo some of the negative misconceptions/stereotypes that surround the programming community. Just like the misconception that "math is hard and/or useless" is under assault, I hope the idea that programming is only done by "geniuses" or "ultra-nerds" can be broken and the barriers for entry and for learning are broken down for the benefit of us all. I am also a little reminded of my first forays into learning Rails with no prior programming experience. I think one of the biggest turning points for me was when I realized the concepts for massive services like twitter were not only understood by crazy math ph.d geniuses untouchable by the common man. It is really empowering to realize you can create real software that can actually do things people need without decades of experience under your belt. I think workshops like this and RailsGirls which have you create an actual (albeit simple) application are great for just that reason.
icelancer 14y ago
At our company, we'd love to add more women developers, and our Chief Architect feels the same way. However, it strikes me as... weird... to focus on it. I don't know. Targeting women for the sake of targeting women has never sat well with me, and though I lack the necessary parts to judge from that side of the aisle, it almost seems patronizing/condescending. Do I want better diversity in our organization? Absolutely. Have most of the women coders I've worked with been above-average? Indeed - actually, now that I think about it, women overall have been better co-workers and employees. But targeting them directly seems strange, and like I said, patronizing/condescending. I dunno. A weird duality that maybe only exists in my mind.
- jacobian 14y ago
  Before 2003, in the entire history of the NFL there had only been seven minority coaches. That year, the league passed the Rooney Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule), which required that teams interview at least one minority candidate for coaching positions. Note that it didn't require that teams hire minority candidates — just that they consider them. Today, about a quarter of current coaches are non-white. The Rooney Rule took the league from seven — total, all time — to 25% — right now — in a decade. In my mind, the Rooney Rule is a good policy to model after. Strict affirmative action is complicated, controversial, and... yeah, I'd feel "weird" just like you implementing hiring quotas. But an interviewing quota (or just a rough goal) seems perfectly legit. The key is to focus on interviewing more women, not hiring more women. Do your best to get more women into the top of your hiring funnel, and you'll likely see more women come out the bottom. And you'll have a wider pool (because this'll force you to interview more candidates, total), which you'll have a better chance that whoever you hire — man or woman — will be awesome.
  - icelancer 14y ago
    Trust me, we interview everyone who passes a phone screen and has a promising resume. It's just that so, so few of them are actually women. I actively pursued an acquaintance of mine to try and get her to work for us, as she was just graduating from a top engineering undergraduate school and was an actuary. Sadly, she took a position in NYC (understandable). We're very strict on hiring, so we do interview many candidates for each position that opens up (we have plenty of open positions now that we can't seem to fill). If we set an interviewing quota, it could literally take us years to hire someone for a mid-level developer position simply because we would get no applicants or no referrals from recruiters that were women. It's just how it is. Very sad.
ultrasaurus12 14y ago
RailsBridge started its open workshop project in mid-2009 with curriculum and processes that are open source and can be used by anyone to teach any group. Sarah Mei and I felt that we could change the ratio simply by teaching more women Ruby on Rails, we would have more women in our community, and we were right. We agreed to make our first workshop open to people with any level of programming experience. (Men could come if they participated in the outreach and found a woman to sign up.) We thought it would be hard to find women to attend our first workshop. We brainstormed for weeks about how to connect to various women's groups and corporate organizations. Then after two tweets and and one email, we had a waiting list in less than 24 hours. Over the last 3 years the pattern repeats itself, no matter where we have workshops, we consistently have waiting lists of women who want to attend. In SF, we have workshops every month, and routinely have 60 people (mostly women) on the waitlist. Women do want to write code. We usually have 20% who have never coded before, but typically 50-70% self-identify as non-programmers. Are you a programmer if you just write SQL? does bash count as programming for a sys admin? does it could if you did COBOL 20 years ago, but you can't do any of the modern stuff? maybe you got a CS degree, but have never done more than a toy app? From a teaching perspective, if you answered yes to any of those questions, you are way ahead of the total beginners -- you understand variables and expressing logic in words and symbols. We have diversity issues in tech, and it isn't just about gender and race. I believe those are just the most visible outward symptom of a problem where we have fairly homogeneous work and communication styles, as well as background and patterns of thinking. If we are going to solve the very real problems we have in this world (and many of those solutions will be facilitated with tech), we need all kinds of people. We need diversity of thought. If you only have one kind of people on your team by a visible metric, you are likely to have much deeper diversity issues. Just because you have a woman or a person of color on the team doesn't necessarily mean you've solved your diversity problems. I applaud the Boston folks for their success in their recent workshop. If you think that the language you develop in would be great for anyone/everyone to learn, you should do the same.
- telecaster 14y ago
  Thank you Sarah and Sarah for starting all this & paving the road for us. The workshop team loved doing it, and we feel very proud be to furthering the mission you gave birth to.

50 points by telecaster 14y ago

danso 14y ago

> A good percentage of the attendees had some exposure to HTML/CSS and several had experience in PHP, Java, C and Python. Two of our students had worked as developers for mainframe computers, writing PL/I and IBM assembler. Cool initiative and I'm all for introducing more programming to everyone...but I wonder whether Rails is the best way to do it. There are many, many moving parts, least of which is the concept of MVC and then the interaction between each part of MVC...nevermind, for those who just know only HTML and CSS, the fundamentals of programming (variables, the difference between "1" and 1, loops, etc), and even how to use the command line.

telecaster 14y ago
I share those concerns & agree that MVC is a lot to swallow in an introductory workshop. But it's also very motivating! A lot of people want to build real websites instead of toy programs. We're trying to harness that awesome source of motivation & it seems to be working despite the drawbacks.
- danso 14y ago
  Yeah, it's a difficult line to walk between teaching what is comprehensible and enabling people, with magic, to do something concrete, even if they know nothing about how anything works. The former bores people because it's too abstract, and the latter...well, I feel there's the risk that when there's too much magic involved, the students feel as if being a "wizard" is an inherent trait, rather than something you eventually build towards after plugging away at the fundamentals. I've toyed with teaching a workshop that entails: teach enough programming to turn a non-flat-file dataset (maybe a json of their tweets) into a decent visualization (by plugging into Google Charts, perhaps) and uploading a static page, with Twitter Bootstrap, onto a free hosting service, or even a blog service such as Wordpress. But even that is a lot to teach in a day: 1. Command line and file system basics 2. Fundamentals of programming (enough to open a JSON file, parse and aggregate it on some conditions, and spit out HTML) 3. Basic HTML and DOM, including what you need to know to 4. Basic webserver/uploading stuff Most workshops struggle with getting 3 and 4 done. #2 is not easily achievable over even several days.
ecoffey 14y ago
I participated in one here Boulder, CO as a TA, and yes there were a lot of moving parts, but what I think was important was not deep diving into any particular thing, but getting to the point where they have pushed a "real" app. I have a few apps of negligible utility that run out on Heroku, and they are no different than the apps Railsbridge participants built. They got to make something real, and got exposed to real tools and infrastructure.

johnleppings 14y ago

I don't understand why the gender of a programmer is relevant to anything. You are concerned that there are no enough women. Why? Why do you want more women? Why is the particular sexual organs that someone has of interest to you?

jacobian 14y ago
Well, I could talk about social justice and basic fairness, but the tone of your question implies that you don't see it that way. So instead, let's look at the question from a coldly calculating point of view. Let's say I have a open source project, and it's got 100 contributors (or community members, users, whatever -- the it's all the same). If my project follows today's averages, that group will be on the order of 98 men and 2 women. Let's say we work to increase our diversity such that now 50% of our community are women. How big is the community now? That's right -- 200 people. It's not like adding 50% women removes 50% men... if we increase the number of women in our community, we increase the number of people. Now I've got twice as many contributors, twice as many users, twice as much activity, etc. Open source projects live and die on the strength of their communities. Increasing diversity is often actually the easiest way to increase membership, full stop. [Now, in practice, I work on diversity because I care about basic fairness. But the point is that even if you don't give a shit about those sorts of ideals, there are still coldly calculating economy-of-scale arguments for why diversity is important.]
- jeremyt 14y ago
  Kudos to you for the honest attempt to reframe, but I think you're just using circular logic. In effect, you're saying "If we could get twice as many people, then we would have twice as many people". In reality, there is some reason why women don't want to be programmers. Therefore, it follows that per capita, it's going to be harder to bring women into the fold. To use your example, if you really wanted to increase your contributors to your open source project, you would be much better served to use your limited capital to attract men who are already predisposed to your project but unaware of it rather than women who are both unaware of it and predisposed against it.

vimota 14y ago

Reminiscent of LLC: http://ladieslearningcode.com/ http://ladieslearningcode.com/ I was a mentor for the Ruby class and absolutely loved the experience, students of all backgrounds were so eager to learn and understand programming.

kookster 14y ago
It's a wonderful thing. Folks should make this happen everywhere, in whatever language. It also was a great experience to help out with the event. In Boston there was a python workshop for women which provided much inspiration for this Ruby one: http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ http://bostonpythonworkshop.com/ There was a similar event some years ago also sponsored by the Berkman Center, with some TAs participating in both: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/2009/10/20/post-workshop-news/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/2009/10/20/post-w... And then there is the Ada Initiative, which I think is fantastic: http://adainitiative.org/ http://adainitiative.org/
heatherpayne 14y ago
Thanks for sharing, vimota! - Heather Payne (Founder, Ladies Learning Code)

shimon 14y ago

This is an important effort with a powerful effect on the Boston tech scene. This and similar outreach efforts (like the Python workshops) have increased diversity not just in the Python and Ruby groups, but more broadly in all tech groups. This was most noticeable at BarCamp Boston 2012, which had a lot more women participants than the previous 6 years. It's great to know that the tech community can be welcoming to all sorts of people.

telecaster 14y ago
Boston Python really led on the diversity outreach front in 2012, and now we (the Boston Ruby community) are very gratefully following their lead. Boston Python is so awesome.

zampano 14y ago

I've heard murmurs of a RailsGirls workshop here in Austin and I know a few of my female friends were very interested in attending when I talked to them about it. I think it's great to try to get more women involved in the industry, and while Rails is complicated enough that you can nearly guarantee most people won't walk away with any true understanding of programming, I think workshops like this can help undo some of the negative misconceptions/stereotypes that surround the programming community. Just like the misconception that "math is hard and/or useless" is under assault, I hope the idea that programming is only done by "geniuses" or "ultra-nerds" can be broken and the barriers for entry and for learning are broken down for the benefit of us all. I am also a little reminded of my first forays into learning Rails with no prior programming experience. I think one of the biggest turning points for me was when I realized the concepts for massive services like twitter were not only understood by crazy math ph.d geniuses untouchable by the common man. It is really empowering to realize you can create real software that can actually do things people need without decades of experience under your belt. I think workshops like this and RailsGirls which have you create an actual (albeit simple) application are great for just that reason.

icelancer 14y ago

At our company, we'd love to add more women developers, and our Chief Architect feels the same way. However, it strikes me as... weird... to focus on it. I don't know. Targeting women for the sake of targeting women has never sat well with me, and though I lack the necessary parts to judge from that side of the aisle, it almost seems patronizing/condescending. Do I want better diversity in our organization? Absolutely. Have most of the women coders I've worked with been above-average? Indeed - actually, now that I think about it, women overall have been better co-workers and employees. But targeting them directly seems strange, and like I said, patronizing/condescending. I dunno. A weird duality that maybe only exists in my mind.

jacobian 14y ago
Before 2003, in the entire history of the NFL there had only been seven minority coaches. That year, the league passed the Rooney Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule), which required that teams interview at least one minority candidate for coaching positions. Note that it didn't require that teams hire minority candidates — just that they consider them. Today, about a quarter of current coaches are non-white. The Rooney Rule took the league from seven — total, all time — to 25% — right now — in a decade. In my mind, the Rooney Rule is a good policy to model after. Strict affirmative action is complicated, controversial, and... yeah, I'd feel "weird" just like you implementing hiring quotas. But an interviewing quota (or just a rough goal) seems perfectly legit. The key is to focus on interviewing more women, not hiring more women. Do your best to get more women into the top of your hiring funnel, and you'll likely see more women come out the bottom. And you'll have a wider pool (because this'll force you to interview more candidates, total), which you'll have a better chance that whoever you hire — man or woman — will be awesome.
- icelancer 14y ago
  Trust me, we interview everyone who passes a phone screen and has a promising resume. It's just that so, so few of them are actually women. I actively pursued an acquaintance of mine to try and get her to work for us, as she was just graduating from a top engineering undergraduate school and was an actuary. Sadly, she took a position in NYC (understandable). We're very strict on hiring, so we do interview many candidates for each position that opens up (we have plenty of open positions now that we can't seem to fill). If we set an interviewing quota, it could literally take us years to hire someone for a mid-level developer position simply because we would get no applicants or no referrals from recruiters that were women. It's just how it is. Very sad.

ultrasaurus12 14y ago

RailsBridge started its open workshop project in mid-2009 with curriculum and processes that are open source and can be used by anyone to teach any group. Sarah Mei and I felt that we could change the ratio simply by teaching more women Ruby on Rails, we would have more women in our community, and we were right. We agreed to make our first workshop open to people with any level of programming experience. (Men could come if they participated in the outreach and found a woman to sign up.) We thought it would be hard to find women to attend our first workshop. We brainstormed for weeks about how to connect to various women's groups and corporate organizations. Then after two tweets and and one email, we had a waiting list in less than 24 hours. Over the last 3 years the pattern repeats itself, no matter where we have workshops, we consistently have waiting lists of women who want to attend. In SF, we have workshops every month, and routinely have 60 people (mostly women) on the waitlist. Women do want to write code. We usually have 20% who have never coded before, but typically 50-70% self-identify as non-programmers. Are you a programmer if you just write SQL? does bash count as programming for a sys admin? does it could if you did COBOL 20 years ago, but you can't do any of the modern stuff? maybe you got a CS degree, but have never done more than a toy app? From a teaching perspective, if you answered yes to any of those questions, you are way ahead of the total beginners -- you understand variables and expressing logic in words and symbols. We have diversity issues in tech, and it isn't just about gender and race. I believe those are just the most visible outward symptom of a problem where we have fairly homogeneous work and communication styles, as well as background and patterns of thinking. If we are going to solve the very real problems we have in this world (and many of those solutions will be facilitated with tech), we need all kinds of people. We need diversity of thought. If you only have one kind of people on your team by a visible metric, you are likely to have much deeper diversity issues. Just because you have a woman or a person of color on the team doesn't necessarily mean you've solved your diversity problems. I applaud the Boston folks for their success in their recent workshop. If you think that the language you develop in would be great for anyone/everyone to learn, you should do the same.

telecaster 14y ago
Thank you Sarah and Sarah for starting all this & paving the road for us. The workshop team loved doing it, and we feel very proud be to furthering the mission you gave birth to.