Sarah Mei

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. [...]

For those of you who attended the June workshop, or wish you had, come join me on July 1st for a hack session at Citizen Space.

If you haven’t been to a hack session before, make this your first! A hack session is unstructured time to work on a project or learn something new from the [...]

Two months ago, Sarah Allen and I started planning a Ruby on Rails outreach workshop for women. Our goal: each participant leaves with a fully-functional development environment, a working application, and some space online to show off their work.
As we got into it we realized it was really, really ambitious. But I am profoundly thrilled [...]

Next month, 80 people with laptops are going to show up and expect me to teach them something about Rails. I want them to see the app they’re writing on the web, but I only have six hours in the workshop (including lunch!) and deployment could easily take that much time by itself. Apache and [...]

Since I got into computer science in college, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking and reading about the gender imbalance in computing. I’ve decided it’s time for me to help fix the problem.
So I’ll be offering a free workshop in San Francisco to reach out to women who want to learn Ruby [...]

System administration and setup are my least favorite part of any project. Today I wanted to set up a wiki on a subdomain – wiki.groupname.com. The main site, a blog, is hosted on an Engine Yard slice that runs nginx. Since I’m usually more of an apache aficionado, I thought I’d note the process.

Request the [...]

Well, I was totally gung-ho about writing up GoGaRuCo Day 1, but it’s taken me a week to get day 2 done.
Part of that was exhaustion – between the conference on Friday and Saturday, the hackathon on Sunday, and, uh, working the five days after that, it’s kind of been full-speed until today. Part of [...]

(With apologies to Zed.)
A few of the talks at GoGaRuCo were crowdsourced – anyone who wanted to talk about anything put their title and description up on Uservoice. Folks who registered got 10 votes each, and the top vote-getting talks were accepted and scheduled.
Out of this came “CouchDB: Perform Like a Pr0n Star” from Matt [...]