Sarah Mei

Diaspora uses CruiseControl.rb to run our continuous integration server. CC.rb is on Rails 2.3, but the applications it’s building are on Rails 3, which means I occasionally run into … weirdness. Last week, for example, I wanted to speed up our builds by upgrading Bundler to 1.0.10 and RubyGems to 1.5.2. Because of the new [...]

I’ve studied Japanese on and off for more than ten years – mostly “off.” I took a year of language when I was in college, but since then it’s just been periodic classes at Soko Gakuen in San Francisco. I managed to pass the JLPT level 3 a few years ago, so in Japan last [...]

Apart from attending Ruby meetups, my main reason for visiting Japan last month was RubyKaigi 2010. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it be all men in button-down dress shirts and pleated pants? Would I give my talk to a room full of blank looks? Would I be the one with the blank look [...]

A few days after we arrived in Japan, Sarah Allen and I went to the weekly hack night put on by Asakusa.rb, a meetup group in Tokyo founded by Akira Matsuda.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 a few [...]