 Welcome to Passion Projects. This is our first talk at GitHub. I want to thank you guys all for being a part of it and I also want to thank our first speaker Rachel Myers who's amazing. She's going to come up here and rock your faces off for lack of a better term. I actually think this is the most women who have ever been at GitHub at one time. This is a really big deal for us. I don't know. Anyway, so thank you guys all for showing up and if anyone you know that's not here wants to catch it live it's just passionprojects.github.com for slash live. There was a GitHub tweet that went out about it too. So thank you guys again and I'm just going to give the stage to Rachel Myers. Thank you. Okay, so I want to start by thanking GitHub and thanking Julia especially. So there's a lot of work that went on. My co-workers are in the back trolling me. Okay. So I'm really excited about this series and I'm really excited to be included. Thank you. So tonight let me start with a quick bio. My name is Rachel Myers and if you want to talk or argue with me after this you can. I exist on the internet. I spend a lot of time drawing on my iPad and I do other things too. My day-to-day work is Ruby. Whoa. I forgive you. Okay. So my day-to-day work is in Ruby Rails, JavaScript, and Backbone. I also really love knowing the whole stack though so I bug our ops team a lot with annoying questions. And recently thanks to Women Who Code I started learning to make silly little iOS apps. I've worked at Modcloth for two years so it's kind of hard for me to summarize my favorite projects. Broadly, the things I've been most excited to work on have been security. We have a giant monorail app so breaking that into service oriented architecture has been great. And then I got to work a lot with mobile web experiences so that has been wonderful. So tonight I'm not going to talk about any of that. I'm going to talk about what I do outside of work. My passion is for expanding the franchise of people who program, making it easier for people to learn to program. And I spend my mornings, my evenings, sometimes a large chunk of my weekend doing this because I think it's really important. I think it improves our world. I think it improves programming and I want to be part of that. There are a lot of awesome organizations that are working to make this possible but I volunteer with RailsBridge. So that's who I am and that's what I'm going to talk about. So tonight I'm going to break my talk into three main parts. Thank you. How I found my way, you guys. First I'm going to talk about how I found my way into programming with the help of RailsBridge. I think that RailsBridge feels a different nook than a lot of other ways that people come to programming. I'm going to talk about the organization as it evolves and how the volunteers are evolving as well. And I'm going to talk about why I think this approach is the best way to spread a love of programming. So I learned to program because someone pointed me to why is point it guide to Ruby. I don't know if anyone knows about or I don't know if everyone, I know that some people know about why. Why the Lucky Stiff really loved the inane details of Ruby. Lots of his projects were about sparking that same love in people. So in my case I read the text and I worked the examples that he gave. And if you asked me a question about Ruby that he had specifically like parroted to me I would parrot it back. What I didn't have was a larger context for what he was telling me. So I'm about to change the slide, this is just a warning. Okay. So what I lacked was a larger sense of what I knew and what I didn't know because there's no book that really tells you. Here's what I've told you and here's all the other stuff that you'll need to do your job. So I in fact thought that he was joking. One of the first things that why has you do is make a Star Monkey. I have a slide of Star Monkey. At some point you'll get there it is. And so I thought he was joking. I thought that programming was for serious and clearly Star Monkeys are not for serious. Next slide. Yeah, sure. The next thing I did was I attended a RailsBridge workshop. Thanks. I was absolutely terrified that I would be the dumbest person at this RailsBridge workshop. Everyone else would know how programming worked and I would be the dumbest person there. But I didn't realize that there's nothing in the whole world embarrassing about not knowing something. It just means that I have to learn it, right? Okay. I can try to go without this. Okay. So as it turned out when I went to RailsBridge what I learned was that I knew a lot more than I realized I did, right? I was talking to people about problems and I was reading and what I needed was a way to connect all those dots, pull all those things together. So when I went to my first RailsBridge workshop, my other students, I went into the like the most beginning class because I didn't know any better, right? They said, are you a beginner? I said, I'm a super beginner. And then I get into my class and all of my fellow students would ask questions like what's a symbol? It's a lightweight string. And what's rake? It's ruby make. Why do I even know that, right? So I was really obnoxious. I'm sure my teachers hated me. But it gave me this context of here's what I know and I know you don't get that any other way. The other thing I realized was that I had gotten this far and I had this far to go, right? There we go. Yay. Okay, thank you. You're going to have to listen because it's a mirroring. Okay, I'm going to try to figure out if I put all the content that I need to say onto my slides are only pictures. We'll see how this goes. That's okay. We all do this you can. Okay. Yeah, we all did that. Okay, so I gained a greater context for what I was learning. I have no idea. I was just to say here. Oh, yeah. Then we created study groups out of that. So when I went to the Rails Ridge, I realized that I had a lot more that I need to learn, right? I gained context for these bits I had been learning in books. So we started putting together study groups. If I realized that I didn't know how version control worked, we would get together and we would learn get. We realized that we didn't know how testing works. So we would get together and we would say TDD. And we didn't understand some core computer science concepts because really you can get started really fast in Ruby and you don't have to learn that. So we realized if we're really going to do this for real, we have to learn these things. So that's how I got started learning. And then once I kind of understood the material, I didn't stop going to Rails Ridge. I just started helping out. So transition. So every time someone would ask a question at a Rails Ridge workshop, so I started TAing and teaching, right? And every time someone would ask a question, I would have to explain it and I would get a little bit better at understanding what the foundational parts of Ruby were. For example, great question about hash. Oh, let me go find that for you. Holy shit, I didn't know that, right? So I really want my speaker notes. So around the time I got my first programming job, my first non-internship programming job, Rails Ridge had grown to the point where the organizers of the workshops needed people to organize them. They needed meta organizers. And so I stepped into that role. Broadly, what it means to be a meta organizer at Rails Ridge is that you find people who want to host a workshop. You find people who want to organize a workshop. You find people willing to spend their marketing budgets on beer and babysitting. So it's great. So when I started doing that, this is supposed to be a picture of San Francisco. We went from having, I know I'm not that good. We went from having one workshop once a quarter in the Bay Area to having workshops about, I would say, every month, every 18 days now. How's that? Is that about accurate? And then we have just as many around the world. So we're having a ton of workshops. And when the workshops happen at the same time, they Skype with each other from across the world and they wave at each other. It's great. So that's how I got into Rails Ridge. That's what Rails Ridge is doing. Now I want to take you on a sidetrack into Starfish. So one of our, we have two founders of Rails Ridge, Sarah Allen and Sarah May. And Sarah Allen read this book, The Starfish and the Spider. And she asked us all to read it. I can't entirely recommend this book. I was very frustrated by some parts of it. If this book about open sourcing things had been open sourced, I would have submitted a lot of pull requests, but it's not. So broadly to give away the thesis, there are hierarchical organizations that rely on leaders for the direction and their vision. There are, there are alternatively some flats and leaderless organizations where and broadly what it means to be an open organization like this is that the people doing the work determine the direction of the entire organization. So the best companies that want to remain innovative and profitable find a way to combine these elements. That's how I get it. Okay, so in the book, the hierarchical organizations correspond to spiders. Spiders are one unit that kind of knows everything about web and can make decisions as like a unified like as a unit, right? And they and they can execute on that idea. In my own in my version of the story, because I want to draw my own pictures, there are there's like a leader, there's a queen bee and there are worker bees. And it's assumed in this model that the queen bee has all of the knowledge and and that the worker bees have craft and technical knowledge that they use to execute on the queen bees on the queen bees vision. So the queen has is supposed to have a vision for everything. But that's, but it if you limit what you, if you limit your set of decision makers, then you then you narrow the scope of the evolution for the organization. Sweet. What is happening? Oh, I know why. One second. This is probably a flat organization. Okay. So there are worker bees, the worker bees have a lot of have a lot of knowledge about what they're doing. They don't have a great ability to structure how to push the organization in one way or another. Alternatively, so starfish don't have a centralized brain. It's kind of a downer. On the other hand, it has a hidden benefit. To illustrate that, there was a voracious like starfish epidemic off the coast of Australia that was destroying coral. And so the dive, the well meaning divers of Australia banded together and they set out to kill the starfish one by one. Unfortunately, they were killing them by cutting them in half with a knife. This is really effective for almost every other form of life on the planet, but not for starfish. So starfish are regenerative. And if you cut them in half with a knife in a couple months, you have two starfish. So these well intentioned divers double the number of predators on the coral. You see the benefit, right? You don't have a brain. And on the other hand, you can evolve and survive things. So in my world, this just means there are a lot of worker bees. There are no queen bees here. And it def and open organizations definitely rely on on some on certain individuals for organization or for inspiration. But that's not the same thing as having a queen bee. Okay, so that was my side track and my side track into starfish. Now I want to bring it back to Railsbridge. So Railsbridge in its early days was headed in a very spidery direction. We had two leaders and they were they were asking their friends to do things for them. Unfortunately, those two leaders are full time engineers with families and lives. So it was like cutting starfish in half or cutting a spider in half. So this magical thing happened. Sarah Allen read this book and she asked us all if we were doing anything for Railsbridge that no one else knew how to do, if we could find someone and recruit them and teach them what we do. In a sense, she asked us all to starfish ourselves, right? We need to grow our organization and this is a way to do it. So in my case, I showed up I showed up to a to meet someone who is going to organize a workshop and she immediately yelled at me for picking a tape as soon as we met. She wandered all over the restaurant and she said, I thought that might be you, but why would you be so dumb as to pick a table without enough chairs? And I realized that was my starfish. She was the person that I would need to help me of all this organization. So Lily is organized and she thinks about things like three steps ahead. I'm very good at skating on chaos. And so this thing that the book predicted really did happen and that is when we starfished ourselves, we evolved as well. We now have two skill sets solving all of our problems. So it was great. Okay, so that's Railsbridge as a starfish. This doesn't quite solve our problem though. So we want to not just affect people in the Bay Area. So Railsbridge as an organization, did I go backwards? Okay. Okay, so Railsbridge as an organization wants to change the world. We have this ambitious goal. We don't just want to help women program in San Francisco. We want to make programming accessible to everyone all over the world. We want to be a starting point for anyone who has this goal. All of our curriculum is open sourced. If you feel like you can contribute in this way, take what we have, make that the starting point and go do your thing. So we have some scaling problems. Community is hard to scale. That's my punchline. Okay. If I had my speaker notes. Okay. So for example, every time I, so I know lots of people are writing really fantastic books for people who want to level up as programmers. They're making podcasts. They're making tutorial videos. Every time you make a video, it can scale almost infinitely. It's over one, right? It's constant time. You create the book one time. You affect lots and lots of people. By contrast, so there's my punchline. By contrast, every time we want to start up a Railsbridge workshop, we have to find money. We have to find volunteers. We have to find organizers. We have to find a venue. So it's not constant time. It's an event. Every person that we want to affect, we have to go out and get them and we have to work for that. Oh wait, fortunately, we're an organization full of engineers, full of creative solutions for scaling. So we have some ideas. Let's go back to the, to some examples. Okay. So my first case study in how to scale Railsbridge is to look at Starbucks. So this is the building in Seattle from which all edicts come for Starbucks. Do you guys recognize it? Okay. So this is where the queen bees live. And the queen bees have a lot of, have a lot of knowledge. They know how long every, it should take to make every drink. They know where the best beans are. They, where some beans are. They know, they know, they know how they need to, they know how every barista needs to work for Starbucks to deliver an efficient experience to all of its over 20,000 locations around the world. So the baristas that we meet every day at Starbucks have a lot of expertise about how to make coffee. They know about Starbucks coffee. There's a craft that they have, and they use that to very efficiently deliver all of our coffee every day. So this model scales really well, right? As long as, as long as people want Starbucks coffee and want this product, this organizational style is going to be fantastic at delivering it to me. So there's a queen bee here. I don't remember what I'm supposed to say about it. Oh, that's my sister. This is so terrible. Okay. So if we, if we lose our queen bee in this model, we hate to think what will happen, right? Like, we don't trust our baristas in this model without a queen bee. This is what we get if we, if we lose our queen bee. This is an intentional humor, you guys. Okay. My next example of, so, so there are some things that work there well for Railsbridge. I really like that they scale so well. I don't want to have a leader because that's how we end up with spiders that like feel like they're being torn into. So we'll take what we can from there. Wikipedia. That's my next case study. So the way that, the way that Wikipedia gets people to contribute is by having a vision of collecting all of human knowledge that's exciting and it's engaging and people want to help. Sounds like Railsbridge, right? So there's no head and every person just puts, puts in what they can. It's a little bit like a tributary flowing into a river. Every person's contribution is helping the entire group of people who want to consume Wikipedia. Is that all I had? This must be all I had. So, I, so this, some of this is really great for Railsbridge, right? We want one person's contribution to benefit lots of people. That sounds awesome. I have another case study, Alcoholics Anonymous. What's interesting about this case is that it's not like Wikipedia. It's essential to the vision of, of Alcoholics Anonymous that every group be independent and that knowledge not spread beyond, beyond the group. The other thing that's interesting here is that the overall organization only contributes a little bit to each one of these cluster of beats. So, they have a book. It's distributed at cost and that's all that the organization has done. They have proclaimed their values, they've given a methodology and they back away. So, this is a bit like silos where each organization is very independent and self-sufficient and that sounds fantastic. So, let's look at an example of a combination of combining the best parts of all these organizational styles. I have a great example. Internet. Before I talk about how the internet actually works, I'm going to talk about how people were not quite ready to understand how the internet works. It's hard to draw the internet, you guys. So, in 1995, a young ISP, Netcom, hired a new CEO to help them fundraise. They were, they were new. They needed money and he was meeting with French investors. It's not relevant to their French. It's kind of funny that they're French. And over dinner, sorry French people in the audience. So, over dinner, he tries to explain how the internet works, what an ISP is and what their business model would be. And one of the investors just hounds him demanding an answer to this question. He won't let him move on until he answers this question. The question that he has to have an answer to is, who is the president of the internet? Right? Like, it just, it doesn't enter his mind that there could, like, that's such a large organization that seemingly works reliably doesn't have someone in charge, right? And so, our brave CEO is very determined and he tries to, he tries to explain things over and over and eventually, just to move the conversation along so he can get to the point where he asks for money, he says, I am the president of the internet. So, that's not actually how it works. So, each one of, each one of these is meant to be an autonomous system and the way that the internet works is that an autonomous system can peer with another system and they can share traffic. They do this using the border gateway protocol which sets, which lets each user set rules for when traffic can access their network. Does that make sense? Yeah, maybe? Okay, cool. So, this is fantastic, right? This is great. Like, so each one of these is very hierarchical. They want to make money. They have a profit motive and yet all of these monopolistically minded companies managed to cooperate in building something awesome. It's kind of badass, especially for someone trying to grow a global organization. So, oh yeah, so I was going to explain. This is an autonomous system. It can't reach this autonomous system over, over there. Anyway, it doesn't matter, I'd explain it. Okay, so those are some organizational examples and now I want to go through those and say all the wonderful things that I want to steal from them. So, from Starbucks, I want to steal its structure. I really, if you come to Railsbridge and you say I want to organize a workshop, I want to hand you something. Just like Starbucks says do you want to be a barista? Here's how to make a cappuccino. I want to have that level of detail so anyone who wants to volunteer knows exactly how they can volunteer. If you show up to be a volunteer at a Railsbridge workshop, I want to make the best possible use of you, right? I want to be able to take what you have to give and put it to the best possible use for the organization. So, love the structure. From Wikipedia, I really love that if I give something to the organization, it benefits everybody. For example, if I find a bug in the curriculum, which happens rarely, then I want to be able to change it and benefit everybody. What's more common is that Xcode has found a new way to be a pain in the ass and I want to be able to fix that problem for everyone as well. So, that's what I want to take from Wikipedia. This is a great point to mention how you too can become a tributary, leading to this wonderful river of knowledge. So, if you want to just use the curriculum, take the curriculum out into the world and do something with it, here's where to get it. If you want to improve the documentation that we have, we have many curricula. If you want to use, if you want to improve any of it, go there. And if you want to have a workshop in your area, use our cookbook. Yeah, this is another great place to mention my second favorite repo. I have to say second favorite because Ali is in the front row. My second favorite repo in the world is Opschool. I'm really excited about this. Just like Railsbridge wants to create engineers, they're trying to create operation engineers, engineers. And I'm super excited because this weekend they're going to have their first workshop where they teach the curriculum that everyone's been contributing to for a while. So, yay. Okay, and from Alcoholics Anonymous, I want to steal the, I want to steal the independence and self-sufficiency. So, even though we have this curriculum that everyone can contribute to, every place that we have a workshop still needs to find venues, still needs to find volunteers, still needs to find organizers. And so, despite all of our best efforts, despite lots of generosity from everywhere around the world, every place that has a workshop needs to be somewhat self-sufficient. This is the coolest part. So, from the internet, I want to steal the ability for lots of independent groups to be able to talk to each other, to share what's best and what they've learned in every organization, and to share that back with everybody else. It's kind of awesome. Okay, so those are some ideas for how we can scale. Let's bring it back. This is a book, so remember when I was like, the other book was kind of, man, this book is fantastic. It spends 10 pages on the creation story of Unix Pipes. They have the values in the right place. So, there's this great quote. I'm going to read it to you, even though they say never return your slides. Much of the history of computer programming can be seen as the effort to expand the franchise, to make it easier for more people to program. And, when you read the book, that really comes through. There's four trends, there's cobalt, both of these started off, these were our first higher level languages, and they started off because they said, assembly's fucking hard. We should, we should make it easier for people. We should have a higher level language. What we ended up doing was making it easier for the professional programmers to program. And, we didn't really bring people in. So, I went to end with a story of someone here, actually, who is bringing in, is like, is like carrying out that goal that people had for programming for a long time. There was a Rails Ridge workshop in this very space a few months ago, and I came and I taught, and I met Allison. Allison is an accountant. She, she is this person that cobalt was made for. Is Allison here? Am I embarrassing? That's awesome! I can say whatever I want now. Okay, so Allison and I worked through the curriculum, the began curriculum, and we called it a day. We like high five, we had a beer and then that was it. And then she went home and she kept learning. So, I ran into her at a party recently, and she told me that she is making an app to help with end of month accounting. She's doing that exact thing that Grace Hopper pushed four years ago when she talked about automatic computing, improving the way that computers and people interact. That's kind of fucking amazing, and Rails Ridge is making it happen. So, thanks for listening. I drew all my papers in paper, and thanks to all my co-workers who told me what should be about my talks, I made it better. We made everything. So, we're going to take a five-minute break, at which point we're going to set up some fancy chairs, and we're going to do a little bit of panel discussion and open QA with all of you guys. QA, Q and A. There we go. Thank you, Rachel, for just putting up with that shitstorm, and our technical team who is just dealing with it right now. They're actually doing a great job. So, thank you guys all for dealing with the lulls. We'll be back in five. So, Rachel Myers, thank you again for dealing with our complicated technical situation. You handled that very gracefully. So, thanks. So, I have kind of like a list of questions that I took down during your talk, and we can just kind of talk about them, and also I heard you're a fan of whiskey. And so, I broke out a bottle of our slow-merge whiskey, and we also had, I deliberately made yours a little taller than mine. So, we can do it. Yeah, cheers. Cheers to Rachel Myers. No, cheers! Awkward silence while we drink. Enjoy. Yeah. Can I clarify that it's whiskey? Uh, yeah, we had those labels. This is uh, I don't even know if I'm supposed to talk about this legally, to be honest. Uh, we had this made for employees internally. We just basically made a label for us, for, it's like four roses, I think. Yeah, it's pretty tasty. I mean, they gave us the barrel that it was uh, slow-merged in. You know, I'm going to stick with that thing. My first question is, what did you do? So, we started your talk with, you are a programmer, and you also teach at Railsbridge, and you volunteer, and these are your passions. But like, where did you start? Like, before you were skating on chaos, where did you, what did you do before you were programming? Um, okay, so before I was a programmer, I was a philosophy teacher at, so what that actually means is I was teen for uh, for like um, first year undergraduate students who needed a humanities credit. Um, I know that it's possible for some of my students to see this, so if you're watching, it's not you, but most of my students didn't give a shit. Um, and it was, it was kind of demoralizing, because you spend your life reading and getting really into the details, and you don't feel like you're doing something with it, and you don't feel like most people care. So, um, so I still really love philosophy. Um, it's not what I do now, because I want to feel like I'm doing a little bit more. Cool, that's awesome. Uh, how many people here studied computer science in college? Wow, that's actually a lot of people, surprise. We have, we have a, we have a philosophy, we have a philosophy major at GitHub, and I've met and fought with Ted over drinks. Nice, I think Ted's watching. He's out, he's out there waiting, watching, creeping. Um, sorry Ted. Uh, so, so did you ever consider like computer programming when you were in school before college? So, um, when I was in brownies, one of our badges was to learn binary, and I did that. That was like the extent of it. They, like they, they ask you, um, like you can, you can translate to base to essentially, right? So, um, they would, they would, like, I would write a sentence, and then I would like translate into ones in zeros, and then I got my badge. And you never looked back. No, I looked at, like, I was like, well that was interesting, I'm not sure anyone does with that, let's move on, right? So, like, brownies could do a better job of showing how that relates to life. That's amazing. Uh, you talked a little bit about open source, and that was a wonderful thing. Um, what was, what was your gateway drug into open source? Like, what was your first open source project? Honestly, my first, uh, open source project was that I couldn't make them by default private, right? Like, and so, and so everything I started doing, like, by default, if you're poor and you want to use GitHub, it just becomes an open source project. So, so I got to do it that way. Good business model. Um, but then, like, my first serious open source project. Um, so, when we would work on, when, like, when we would get together in little study groups, uh, we would work through examples from books, and I would, I would, um, see someone's example and say, well what if we do it this way, and, you know, really just went the diff, and so that kind of interaction was probably, like, my first introduction, which is different from, like, a production-ready open source project, right? Yeah. Um, where the standard is a little higher, hopefully. Some places. Some places. Awesome. Well, that's a pretty good answer. I only have a couple more questions, so if you guys start thinking of things that you want to ask Rachel, feel free to, we have a question. That was easy. Okay. I fired a starfish and it doesn't respire. Okay, that's a great question. Do you want to repeat it for everyone? Um, it was a really long, how does an organization, like Railsbridge, go from spider to starfish without going back to spider? Awesome. Cycles. Yeah, how do we not fall back into spidering? Okay, um, so one, I think that's, so it's a really great point. Um, we, we tried to starfish, and it's been a couple years, so we probably need to continue to spider, or starfish. Um, and I've been really tempted to spider in my days, so when Steven Vang, um, what, wanted a conference bio, I wanted some way to represent his contributions to the organization. So I suggested, on text to several people, hey, how about we have a core team, just so Steven can be on the core team, right? That was, that was my idea. And, and then I realized that's a terrible idea, right? So like, so some of the things that Railsbridge can do to avoid becoming a, a spider are to avoid having a core team to, um, to continue to starfish, and to, like, and by continue to starfish, I don't want to be like, I don't want to make it sound easy, right? Like what that means is you find people who are as committed as they need to be, like, very committed. And, um, and find a way for them to contribute in a way that they can, right? So, so I found Lily, because Lily was really, she had a clear vision of how things should happen, and that was exactly what we needed. To continue to do that, I think you'd have to continue meeting people and finding people and starfishing them into, like, your other starfish. I don't know, does that answer your question? Does that not quite answer your question? There's a but. Lily, are you upset about being my starfish? The question was, wait, what was it? Can you say anything? Sorry. So, if people make crazy contributions like Steven has, and you say, no, you can't be on the core team because we don't have one, how do you then go in and say, like, but we love you and thank you so much? Um, Steven's here, so maybe we can just say, uh, can we have like a party or something with that, like, would you feel appreciated? So, so the the original question was how do you know that, or how do you ensure that your starfish are happy being starfish? I'm not sure, I guess, is the like the ultimate answer. That's okay. Okay. Okay. We'll have to all work on that. That's cool. So, I have another programming question. Okay. I hope you're not bored with these yet. So, there are so many different languages and specific disciplines in programming, like, how do you, I think it's really common for, uh, you know, new learners to just be kind of overwhelmed, especially if they don't immediately click with something. There's like, they're not getting that immediate satisfaction, they get overwhelmed with it, and they kind of just shut down, and they're like, no, programming is not for me. So, how do you, like, how do you pick the language? Like, how did you pick Ruby, or how did you, you know, is it, it can't be solely based on organizations like Railsbridge, right? Like, there needs to be like a different avenue. So, I'm betting that it can totally be based on organizations like Rails, but that won't be my answer. Um, so I got into programming Ruby because of why. Like, there's a very, like, direct connection, like, this was my first book, um, this book seemed accessible, um, and I, and I just, like, decided I'm gonna, I'm just gonna, like, power through this book and try to learn it, right? And, like, after you put so much into learning one language, there's, like, I was disincentivized to go try to do Python immediately, I went to, like, finish Ruby through, and, like, feel like I understood that. Um, and, like, how you choose your first language, I think, is very accidental. Right? Do you think it has a lot to do with, like, trends? Like, I knew, like, Ruby on Rails, and, like, web startups, you know, it's, like, very popular right now, so, like, I'm not saying that's, you know, specifically, like, why a few of us have chosen it, but, like, do you think that has a big impact? Um, it must have a big impact, right? Like, the more, so Ruby was terrific, a terrific starting language for me because so much of the, um, community is invested in building out projects for people to learn. So, um, so there was never a shortage of projects, of cones, of, of, like, uh, exercise to the reader, right? There were, there were always many of those for me. So many that, like, I always felt like, oh, I have to do three more today because there were, there were these eight new repos that showed up today, right? Um, so I would say, I would say, like, it's accidental, but Ruby made it very easy for me. Gateway language, you would say. Exactly. Um, cool. Do we have any other questions from you guys? Yeah? I'm not, I'm not familiar with RailsBridge and I kind of wanted to know kind of the scope of the side of the organization so, you know, approximately the only people involved in the project. That's, um, part of being a, a flat organization is that we're really bad. Like, it's, it's a little bit like alcoholics anonymous, right? To, um, to have a chapter of, oh wait, do you want to repeat, sorry. Yeah, I can repeat it. Um, so I think, so one of our audience members wants to know what the scale of RailsBridge actually is, like, the number of people, right? I think it's that ballpark. Ballpark. Rachel does not have these tattooed on her forearm. I'm looking at it right now, turns out. So, uh, part of being, like, alcoholics anonymous in addition to, never mind, I'm not going to make a bed joke, um, is that we're not good at, um, sending information back to headquarters as it were. So we've started to get better at that, but we still have about four years of data that's missing. So, um, it's hard to estimate. Um, what we can say is, like, what the RSVP limit, generally, is, like, on average, and then, like, do multiplication for the workshops that we know about. And, um, I, like, at this point, it's something like a hundred thousand people, or, wait, what, what is it, Lillie, you're here. Because you'll have ever attended a workshop at the student org office here. Is that true? Okay. But that other city, but that whole other city that we've had workshops in? It's nice. It's like a number of organizers, just non-organizations. Okay. I'm starting to think that Lillie might, like, work in different organizations. Not the greatest starfish. So the correct answer is we don't know. Fighting harder. Uh, okay. Hi. The question was how many people have gone on to become ruby developers from this organization? I have only anecdotal, knowledge of this, because we're bad at sending information back up the hierarchy, because there's not a hierarchy. The, the people that I kind of, like, moved with when I was going through Reelsbridge are almost now all engineers. And that's entirely anecdotal, and it's about, like, the people who I was around. That's, so that's like, so I can say there are at least 10 of us, right? I'm sure you have. Which is, which is more female engineers than I've ever worked with, at any company. So that's a pretty good number, I would say. Yeah. So I have one more question. It's kind of a big one. I'll let you think. I'll maybe let you drink on it. So, the, one of the reasons that I started passion projects was to get, get GitHub. Get GitHub, that's such a hard thing to say. Get GitHub more involved in sort of these grassroots efforts with just, not just women, but also in teaching and learning. And like, there are a ton of people at GitHub who volunteer with Reelsbridge and Reelsgirls and a couple other organizations. But like, on a grander scale, what can GitHub do to make it easier to learn to program? So I think GitHub is particularly well positioned to minimize like the, the costs that you pay to get into programming. Because, because you go to GitHub, like when, as soon as you have written your first like three lines of code, you want to like start posting it. You want to show your friends. I think, well, there, there are tons of good answers. And in this particular audience, like I'm not the most expert on what GitHub can do. Like I have, like some things that people can do and all organizations can do are like giving engineers the time to like spend time mentoring, right? Those kinds of, those kinds of projects. When you, when you have projects that bring more people in. And I don't mean to make it even about women exclusively. I mean to just say, all forms of diversity. That, like that's a huge, that's a huge step. Like to, to show people, to sit down with people and work through problems the way that you would work through them. Show us people that they can work through those problems in the same way. That's awesome. And I'm assuming this is kind of like a second part, but I'm assuming that's something you look for in a company you want to work for. I was like, my next question was when you, like we're looking at companies and you join ModCloth. Like what are the, what are the attributes of a company that you look for? So when I joined ModCloth, they told me, when I talked to the recruiter, they said we're 80% women as a company. And I didn't ask the follow-up question, how many women are on your engineering team? I just assumed, right? There were none. I was the first one. And now I ask much harder questions. Like now we have, now we have a terrific team on the team that I work with every day. We are 50% women, which is fantastic. They're in the back. They're enjoying that applause. And so, and so like, it's like we're very good at holding our company accountable. We, we work with our CTO to make sure that the way that we're presenting ourselves to the world is maximizes like the good, the good candidates that we're getting in. I guess that's how I would say it. That's awesome. Okay. Well, thank you, Rachel. Do you guys have any more questions? I know I missed someone. Yeah? I'm a Rails bridge, right? Like Rails bridge is amazing for building this enthusiasm over two days, kind of getting the snowball rolling. Have you seen anybody who are trying to engage over months? Yeah, that's a, that's, oh, go ahead, sorry. Have you seen any long-term, I don't know, what's a good word for that? Like, continued learning or continued studying through Rails bridge, specifically. So there, so sometimes people will spontaneously create study groups. Another thing that I have to say is women who code is great at forming long-term study groups. So the person who runs the Ruby, and is it Ruby specific or Ruby in Rails? So Ruby Tuesdays is the women who code group that does, like an ongoing every single Tuesday. They'll have a meetup where they work on their Rails project. They also have ones for iOS and JavaScripts and probably leaving others out. So that, that's one example. That's women specific in a way that Rails bridge is like, not a Rails bridge. Oh, and it came out of Rails bridge. That's awesome. I didn't know that. It's good to have all the starfish in the room in a tag like this. Awesome. Any more questions? Yeah. Trying to learn how to program, when was the kind of transition where you felt comfortable enough that you wanted entering the professional program? So this is really interesting. So it was, the question was, what was the point at which you felt comfortable in like going on interviews and entering the professional world of programming? So I was working, I was working examples kind of on my own and I went to, and I would go to a lot of meetups because that was another way to get a sense of where I stand and what I'd need to learn after this. And I like, I guess the short answer is I never felt that way. I felt that way long after I had been doing it. I don't think, I don't think anyone ever feels like they know everything because the thing about technology is it moves so quickly and there's, everything changes so fast. Like, I don't think it's like, everyone is everyone like, okay, we're done. Like, we're done. We don't have to learn anymore. Like you're always constantly having to learn or you're going to get left behind. So it's like really hard to feel comfortable. Like, yeah. Just quick sidetrack. There was, Justice Breyer was on Charlie Rose like years ago and he was talking about trying to encourage his son who didn't want to do his homework. And he said, oh, you should get used to this because if you're really smart and you work really hard and you're pretty lucky, you can do this for the rest of your life. Right. And that's what it's like to be a programmer. Right. Like if you, if you get good at learning, you're going to get to do this for the rest of your life and that's what you're aiming for. Yeah. There's a really great quote. I don't know where this comes from, but learn to learn is basically like the way to, like teaching yourself to be resourceful is probably like the best gift you can give yourself and kind of, that's job security. Like that's, that's what that is. And then I have one story about how I started. And that is I was at a meetup and Sarah Allen, before she had started Railsbridge, said, you know, I find it really hard to find, to find junior people to hire. Like if you have a great junior person, I would love to pair with them in my spare time. And I was sitting in the bag, I said, and I just shouted out obnoxiously like, I would pair with you for free if you want to do that sometimes. And so she brought me into interview and she's like, well, you definitely can be pairing with me for free, but you can if you want. So, that's how I got into it. And then I worked for like, I worked there for free for a long time. And then I became like the real intern and then I like moved on. And at every step, I always feel like I'm jumping a little bit ahead of where I really belong. But, oh well. So it goes. All right. Thank you guys so much for coming out. We're actually having, sorry, Melissa, don't get too excited. So we're actually throwing a drink up nearby at the Alchemist, I think is the name of the bar and they look like they have really good cocktails and they're free because they're on GitHub. So come help me spend our money and celebrate. You guys all coming out for our first talk.