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 [...]

You’re Asking The Wrong Question. I’m in Hawaii for the Aloha on Rails conference. The last session on Monday was a panel moderated by l4rk that included Obie Fernandez, Pat Maddox, Blake Mizerany, and Tammer Saleh. The topic: “Is Agile Too Slow?” Ostensibly we were there to talk about whether there were any circumstances under [...]

Please post your comments here on my Teaching Kids article. I wrote an article for the RailsBridge Teaching Kids site about my experience teaching Ruby to high school girls a few weeks ago. Go read it over there! That site doesn’t have comments, though, so I’m linking back here because I’d like to hear your [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]