Sarah Mei

Preliminary slides for my RailsConf talk I’m giving this afternoon on conceptual tools for evaluating databases. Contains some profanity at the beginning. Slides are subject to change since I haven’t actually given the talk yet!

I use rspec on every project, and I’ve started adding cucumber to all my projects in the last few months. There’s lots of information out there about how to set up and use cucumber, but there isn’t much covering your developer workflow when you’re using these tools.
How do you start, and how do you know [...]

I’ll be hosting another Ruby hack night on Tuesday, June 1st, at Pivotal Labs – 731 Market St, between 3rd and 4th in San Francisco. You can RSVP here.
You’re welcome to bring any sort of Ruby-related project! The theme for the evening is Javascript testing, following on this month’s monthly meetup. But I won’t make [...]

The peninsula has all kinds of neat hack events like SuperHappyDevHouse and various Hacker Dojo events. But I hate driving all the way down there just to hang out with hackers and get something done on a project. There are plenty of hackers in San Francisco. There might even be more of the type of [...]

Yesterday I did a talk at SCALE 8x called “Moving the Needle: How SF Ruby Got to 18%.” Broadly, the topic was how to get more women into a technical community. I talked about how, specifically, we took the SF Ruby monthly meetups from 2% women to 18% women over the past year.
Short version: it [...]

Just finished my LA Ruby Conf talk on teaching Ruby to kids. Here are a few further resources:

…is now open for registration. Last year Sarah Allen and I did three workshops for women and this year we’re going for four. So, if you’d like to learn Rails and can come BOTH Friday, February 26th in the evening AND Saturday, February 27th during the day, go sign up! There are only [...]

Applies to: Ruby 1.8.7, compiled from source, on OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
I’ve been working on a side project that deals with Japanese text in Ruby. I installed rtranslate, a gem that gives me programmatic access to Google Translate. I wanted to try it out in irb.
>> require ‘rtranslate’
=> true
So far so good.

>> Translate.t(”

Here’s where [...]

Registration is now open for the free Ruby workshop for women that Sarah Allen and I are running at the end of July. Please RSVP soon – the last workshop filled up less than 3 days after registration opened.
This is a two-day event open to total programming novices, system administrators, and developers in other languages. [...]

Pivotal Labs will be hosting our next workshop on July 31st and August 1st – that’s Friday evening and Saturday all day.
The format will be similar to our first workshop: Friday night is a mixer and installfest. Attendees bring their laptops, and, with the help of our volunteers, install anything they’re missing to run Rails. [...]