Gender and Technology

We can’t thank everyone enough who contributed and attended the Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women.  From the feedback, it appears to have been a tremendous success.

So cool that folks travelled to Boston from as far away as PA to attend Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women!!

…it makes a huge difference to be able to ask someone stupid ?s.

I like being able to say that I deployed my first Rails application today before lunchtime like running a half marathon.

Totally impressed with the amount of Ruby and Rails info the students absorbed.

I want to thank the teaching assistants at #rorw4w. You were never judgmental and always patient.

You know what’s a lot of fun? TAing at #rorw4w.

It was indeed entirely attitude-free, as promised – unique in my experience! I appreciated that so much, and I had a lot of fun, as well.

Read about what our teachers thought about the workshop.  Sarah Allen wrote about Stone Soup and Andy Gregorowicz wrote about the workshop from his perspective.   Or just check out the tweet stream.

Moving forward, we encourage our newly empowered programmers to meet monthly at the Open Source Code Crunch.  If you want to stay in the loop, please join the OSCC mailing list.

Open Source Code Crunch

Women are a minority in most technical communities, but in open source communities the numbers are even smaller — by a factor of about ten or more.

The Open Source Code Crunch seeks to promote mixed gender collaboration. Programmers will meet monthly and use their skills towards open source projects in a welcoming, collaborative, attitude-free, newbie-safe environment.

First meeting will be on October 21st at 6pm
The Berkman Center
23 Everett Street, Second Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone (617) 495-7547

Please join our mailing list for future events and news.

The Gender and Technology committee would like to thank all of our generous sponsors who are making this weekend’s Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women possible.  Thanks to them, attendees needn’t leave the workshop in search of coffee and food.  But more importantly, we will be webcasting the event live!  More details here.

While all our sponsors were enthusiastic about contributing towards childcare costs, Julia Ashmun was our sole individual contributor earmarking her donation to waive referral fees for attendees in need of sitter services.

Our first sponsor Hashrocket has got to be one of the coolest dev shops on the planet.  If only because Desi Mcadam works there, founder of DevChix.  Thanks for all your support, Desi!

Congratulations to EngineYard who just raised 19 Million with new investors. Nice to hear good karma coming back to good people.

We also send thanks to GitHub, the most popular Git hosting site.  Brought to you by Logical Awesome.  Don’t you just love that name?

And lastly we are grateful to RailsBridge for inspiring these workshops and reaching out to individuals and groups who are underrepresented in the community.

Thanks so much!!  Can’t wait to meet everyone tomorrow!

We’re excited for the upcoming Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women event.  The enthusiasm of the ruby on rails community has exceeded expectations.

We’re proud that we’ve been able to offer childcare to our attendees who might not have otherwise been able to attend and due to a generous donation made by Julia Ashmun, the referral fee has been waived!

The focus of the event is to encourage women to participate in open source development.  So workshop coordinators made the request that men who wish to attend find a woman to sign up who might not otherwise have considered checking out a tech event.  There was never any intention to exclude men from the event, but rather enlist their help in broadening the community.

So in response to community feedback and to be as inclusive as possible, we’re opening the event up to anyone who would like to attend — girl geeks, boy geeks, and all geeks in between.  Just sign up here. Looking forward to the day!