 Yes, so this morning, or actually this night, I went to sleep at 10 o'clock. I woke up at 1am in the morning and I was like, ah, I'm so happy and I have so much energy. And I was trying to figure out what would be a good title for this talk and the only thing I could think about is computers are the best because who wouldn't want a work companion who doesn't get bored, who can do like all of the tedious, repetitious tasks that you hate doing, that doesn't need like a lunch break, who always does things correctly when told things correctly and I think that is the best part of programming that you get these like almost superhuman skills to get this like the best friend in the world really. Oh, that sounded pretty sentimental. Anyways, my name is Linda. I'm a children's book author and an illustrator. I'm a very mediocre programmer myself and I'm a business school dropout and accidentally four or five years ago I was in Helsinki, Finland and I couldn't find any other women who were interested about programming and I decided that there needs to be an event to make women excited about programming and I was kind of solving my own problem because I wanted to learn more about programming but I didn't have that peer group or that group of people where I could ask the dumb questions and I fit like that everyone else knew so much and so forth and so forth and one of my best friends, Garis Armin, said that oh, like our organization a Rails consultant called Kiskalabs, like we could host this and within two weeks we had whipped up the first Rails Skills event and it was pretty much like 20-ish of our best friends in Helsinki region and like I remember making tomato soup for everyone, like a very low-key thing and we made a website and we were super excited and we had no idea if this was going to ever work or so and like never ever in a million years could I have imagined that I would be here standing in front of all of you talking today because, let me see, yeah, because Singapore so the internet started to talk about this event and there were all sorts of tweets going on and saying that hey, like there's some really cool things happening in Helsinki I wish we had this in the Python community, la la la and someone from Singapore called Jason Ong he tweeted at us and said that hey, we should do this in Singapore and at this point, like I had never in my life been in Singapore before I had a very vague idea what Singapore was like we had no idea if this curriculum was any good we had no budget for anything but I was pretty adventurous and again, like I had never been to Singapore and I really wanted to go so we packed our bags and these were like the drawings I made four years ago and I imagined that you would have changed it by now but no, I see they are still the same ones and we came over here and I think it was a few blocks away from here like the original event and I was so, so nervous when I was here because I wasn't sure if people were going to laugh us out and say like this is a stupid idea, like get lost from here but the event went really well and yeah, people tweeted about it and that's DHH over there, like saying Rails for Girls is really cool and DHH is the founder of Rails Girls he's like this Ruby on Rails with the framework and he's this really like bad mouth Danish guy with a really cool hair and I remember printing out that feed and putting it on my mobile like wow, this is the biggest moment in my life like DHH knows what I'm doing and there was something very special about what we were doing because we wanted to teach programming in a way that made it human and in a way that made it see, like the people who are here the people who write the code, they are humans as well there's a lot of sort of culture and compassion in the programming scene and you need to ask from your coaches who is maths, who is DHH who is why, like ask, who is tender love the Ruby community has it so, but yeah, it's a real person you're loving now, but you're here soon enough why do Ruby programmers like Bacon, like all of these questions that are there that made programming so magical and fun in the Ruby community and today Rails Girls is this huge network of passionate, local grassroots organizers in over 230 cities around the world so people in Amman, in Egypt, in Australia, in US in Singapore, in Vietnam, in Helsinki, in Berlin are all doing this and I figured like I'm not probably the best person to teach you programming but I can tell you about the Rails Girls network and kind of what you're getting yourself into by being a part of the global Ruby community so I think a really important thing to understand is that this is all done by volunteers every single person who's here on this Saturday morning is doing this because they want to see more diverse Ruby community and a more diverse programming community and this isn't happening only in Singapore it's happening everywhere in the world and the co-chief, like I could have written the world's best or worst curriculum but it doesn't make any difference unless like the local Ruby developers take this into their hearts and feel like they want to do this stuff further and when you go to GitHub and you see all of the comics made by the coaches around the world, like they make the curriculum better every single day they create new content that's really, really exciting to see and that's what's allowed Rails Girls to become such a movement that doesn't have, like there's never been any central funding there's never been any legal structure around Rails Girls it's all happened very, because of people wanting to see that change one of the really exciting things about Rails Girls is that content changes through interaction so nothing is ever ready in this world so the curriculum we used four years ago, it has expanded it has become better, it has become more simple because of the people who change it and I want you to remember this point because all of you can be a part of this global community of changing things, of like maybe you spot a typo in the guides and you can go and like fix that stuff and that's why that's what allows software to become so much better over time because we build on top of each other instead of trying to sort of, no, I own this, like, don't touch this is my thing, we open up things and share them with everyone that's allowed computer science to become so massive in the last years so you'll get to know this quite soon enough and there's a lot of material for you to go through in a second this is kind of a more general point about the Rails Girls community and the Ruby community there are so many different ways for you to participate in this community there's people who write the code for sure like who are the Rails commuters and the Rails core commuters and Ruby core commuters but there's also people who make educational materials who ask really good questions, who do bug triaging who try to find, like, problems from the consortium who organize events like this so there's so many different ways to be a software developer nowadays and be a part of a community and learn more one of the proudest things for me is the idea that Rails Girls is full of leaders, not only followers I think it's really weird the way our society is obsessed with, like, Twitter followers and Facebook followers my number one goal has always been to allow as much leadership and as much independence for each chapter that is out there and that means that sometimes I don't have any idea what's happening in the local chapters but it also means that stuff like this happens so Rails Girls Summer of Code one of you might next year want to participate in this so this is entirely run by the Berlin team by the good folks of Travis CI and the first time Anika told me that it would be really cool if we would take the Rails Girls teams or, like, the most, like, excited beginners from each Rails Girls group and make, like, a global summer program where they could get to contribute to open source software and get paid and get mentorship and I was like, are you mad? Like, there's no way that's gonna happen and in my mind there was no way that that was gonna happen but in Anika's mind it was totally clear that this was gonna happen and she was such a boss and just made this happen and now it's the third time that it's running it's a global so for those of you who are not familiar with the Summer of Code concept it's that idea is that you get beginners to work on open source projects you get mentorship, you get funding and you get to see if you really want to become a software developer and Singapore totally should apply to this as well there's been teams in India, in US, in Europe in South America, everywhere in the world so this is something and, oh, yeah, you can also participate as a volunteer team so if you don't get selected as one of the team you can still benefit from the community oops okay, I'm not gonna take any more time I just wanted to give you, like, three small things to take because many of you are gonna be so overwhelmed and exhausted after this day and be like, I hate programming this is not gonna be my thing and it's completely totally normal Railsicles is a packed day we want you to feel overwhelmed and the idea is, many people ask like why stuff with Rails is a really hard language to understand and master the idea is that you build something visible today and then you have the rest of your life to understand what actually happened during those building sessions so don't feel overwhelmed if you're like what is this scaffold being? Like, how does this work? The idea is that you build something really rapidly that you can be proud of you can show to your colleagues next week and then you come back to these Railsicles events and then you actually learn what's happening and I work with a lot of kids and one of the saddest things with little girls, for instance, is that they forget one semicolon from their code or one, like, paraphrase or something like that and they're like, I'm really bad at programming and like, no, you're not really bad at programming making mistakes is such an important part of coding even the best coders in the world they make mistakes every single day and I've yet to hear about a profession where they pay you so much for making mistakes every single day so if you feel like there's a typo here I'm stupid, no, you're not stupid like every single programmer goes through that's part of the profession to sort of end your bad process Second tip, asking questions is an important part of coding if you feel like I didn't get that I don't know stuff in advance that's okay, all the programmers I know they Google stuff every single day the ability to find and solve problems is one of the paramount characteristics of a good programmer because programming changes all the time Rails as a framework is like 10 years old roughly, something like that and it means that things change all the time so you need to be really good at asking questions and yesterday at Red Dot Tenderloin who you'll hear hopefully about more later said that you need to ask the question why like if you run into a problem with your code ask why and don't settle to that like your coach saying oh it's like some sort of magic happens there like really like pester them about why this is happening, I don't understand and learn to Google yourself too so when you run into a problem don't first ask the coach first try to solve it yourself and then ask the coach that also gives you the skills to keep going as your programming advances and final piece of information this is like the big key that took me four years of programming to understand that big problems are just small problems stuck together super simple but like whenever you run into like when you look at Facebook you're like I could never build a Facebook but when you chop it into smaller problems so I need a user login I need some sort of a database I maybe need some sort of feed here and then I maybe need like an ability to post pictures that's how you get ahead and many of you might have some sort of ideas and now like what you want to build and it's okay if you don't but the idea is that you can't build a Facebook for dogs in one day but you can probably make the user login in one day or like a sign up form or something like that so just take a big problem start working through it job by job and with that I'm going to skip through that I think it's really awesome to see all of you here and I'm so privileged to be back in Singapore I can't imagine how giddy I feel about seeing all of you here and seeing this whole thing grow you're going to have such an amazing day today you all have so much potential inside of you it's not going to be an easy journey but I'm really really happy that you took this Saturday off and decided to like dedicate some time for this and thank your coaches because they are doing amazing and the sponsors and everyone like this would cost so much money you guys so that's part of like they really want to see you come back to this community and be a part of it with that, yes awesome