Afternoon story time

Kent, Ruby, and Me: How I test-drove my Career - Davis Frank @dwfrank (pivotal labs, in charge of official open-source efforts)

  - Career History
   - Quit in 2006
    - Faced w/ management job decisions (couple of lousy interviews)
    - Took a bit of a break
  - Met Kent Beck (extreme programming white book) nut house in Palo Alto -- did not drink MGD
    - New First Principles
      - Dave suggested Ruby on Rails (summer '06) - Pickaxe, Agile Dev w/ Rails
      - This is why Ruby exists -- to make us happy - and speaker was happy again
    - Spent a lot of time camped out in Pete's next to an Apple store
      - Wrote a lot of docs for the Rails wiki (cygwin -- eclipse and windows for rails dev)
    - [YES WE CAN]
      - avoid not coding... bills called and revenue was needed
    - Now an Associate Director at Pivotal Labs
      - Help pivots w/ projects in an educational role
    - Pivotal wrote Jasmine (RSpec for JavaScript)
      - Speaker hasn't given up on Ruby
    - Wrote Keydown and Anchorman
    - Think about your Career in the same way you think about your code
      - Don't be afraid to throw it all away
  - Thanks [Dave, Kent and Matz]
  - RailsConf '08: an epilogue
    - Kent Beck ( mistook him for another crazy guy but remembered he was cool )

Davy Stevenson

[No slides]
- Not her legal name -- and no you won't know it
- Team Building
  - 4 years ago.. joined Elemental Technologies. Elemental do video transcoding for comcast, HBO, etc.
    - Most of the Engineers there are working in C/C++
    - Using Rails and a Web Framework to produce a UI and a REST API w/ automation made their products available
      - speaker was a team of one originally (for a few years)
    - Started to hire additional people
      - Speaker moved into a lead position
    - Had to double team size in 6 months
      - diversity in knowledge base w/ a wide variety of skill levels
    - Spent a lot of time on outreach
      - Local User Groups
    - Interviewing
      - combating natural bias toward comparison... if you do not you'll have an homogeneous team
      - a lot of people with a lot of personalities
        - dealing w/ conflicts
        - important for everyone within a team to create an environment for everyone to ask questions
    - After 6 months
      - 33% female, unfortunately within Portland it's a sea of white faces
      - Doughnut Fridays -- other teams expressed envy of the interaction within the team
      - information transfer was greatly increased because people were able to ask questions in a safe environment and perspectives were different so it brought in a lot of unique solutions
    - The Ruby Community is a large team -- we need to be friendly, welcoming and open

Jesse Toth

[No Slides]
Curiosity
- As developers, curiosity is one of our greatest assets
- Thought College would be a space where one could go and discover -- to keep her curiosity
  - Majored in Computer Science
  - When speaker got there was dissatisfied with the state of courses -- prerequisites and other things
- Class w/ large reading list (everything speaker ever wanted to read)
  - Spent a lot of time in office hours w/ professor
    - advisor says you know that's because you don't belong here you should be at Berkeley
- First semester was terrible (grades tanked)
  - speaker wasn't interested in the things
  - intimidated by classmates -- constantly comparing
- Compilers
  - First lecture, how compilers worked and that we would be building a full compiler
  - Fascinated
- Each semester after that speaker found a course that did the same thing for her
- Went to work as a Rails consultant
  - doing the consulting thing let her see a lot of projects
  - wanted to do a deeper dive after some time
- Tried a few start-ups
- Met some people from Github
  - Hired
  - Did some amazing work in the first few weeks
  - Started comparing herself to co-workers and got unhappy, work quality declined
  - Started a new project
    - got interested
    - coded the whole week and solve a long standing problem
    - got happy again
  - Stopped and reflected
    - curiosity was the root of it
    - fear of showing ignorance or not measuring up replaced curiosity
  - Looked around
    - The reason they did the open source projects they did was because they were curious
- Stay Curious
  - If you weren't curious in the first place, go find something that makes you curious