Posts filed under 'Professional'
Today’s Horoscope:
Mercury remains in the spotlight today, prompting emotionally charged interactions with your friends at work. …No kidding.
Thanks so much for organizing the workshop. I hope to attend. I love the idea, think these workshops are necessary, and would love to help out in the future if you need.
Personally, however, I do feel that the following, “Men are warmly welcomed when they find a woman who wants to learn Ruby on Rails who will register and bring a guest.” is exclusionist.
I have been in scientific software development for many years. I am also a wife and a mother of two. I agree full-heartedly that women in technology and certain areas of science face many struggles, discrimination, and blatant sexism. We might bridge the gap better though with more welcoming attempts that seek to include, but educate men in our struggles. We can’t do this though if they cannot join our events – outright. Perhaps in the future, you could just sell the event as simply women-in-technology focused, but leave the door open for men as well?
I understand the need, but the registration restriction is illegal:
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…”
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972
Folks, I do not consider this workshop to be exclusionary especially considering that the current ratio of women to men is 2:1.
The point of the event is to encourage women developers. So the caveat that a man is asked to encourage a woman to sign him up as her guest feels entirely appropriate.
Besides, there are many many other tech events that are primarily male driven. And sadly many of these events do tend to be exclusionary to women through subtle competitive atmospheres and in some cases not so subtle sexist comments. Just check out the geekfeminism wiki regarding recent tech events for more notable examples.
Starting in November, we will be having a regular Wednesday evening event pairing newbies with ruby on rails rockstars to work on open source projects in a welcoming, collaborative, mixed gendered environment. (Meaning that men are very welcome to attend on their own.) The idea is to encourage learning rather than the competitiveness found in other tech events. And “educate men in our struggles” by working alongside them.
No. I will not rescind the “come as a guest” request for this ONE event. It is my understanding that making a “request” is entirely legal.
p.s. Boston ruby group is a lovely group of people and I do not include them as part of the exclusionary tech events referred to above.
How can it not be exclusionary when you advertise that a man is only allowed to attend if accompanied by a woman, but a lone women is fine?
It most certainly IS illegal, even just to advertise it in that way.
Consult a lawyer unless you wish to risk Harvard losing federal funding:
Title IX is administered by the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education (OCR).[3] It applies to an entire school or institution if any part of that school receives federal funds; hence, athletic programs are subject to Title IX, even though there is very little direct federal funding of school sports.[4] The regulations implementing Title IX require all institutions receiving federal funds to conduct self-evaluations of whether they offer equal opportunities based on sex[5] and to provide written assurances to the Dept. of Education that the institution is in compliance for the period that the federally funded equipment or facilities remain in use.
The intention is admirable, but the implementation is legally flawed.
Just because it “feels entirely appropriate” doesn’t make it legal!
I appreciate you pointing the legalities of the event. I’ve contacted our clinical office to confirm.
But I won’t allow you to ignore the more important part of my message regarding the exclusionary tactics of other “open” tech events.
Rather than welcoming men as guests, perhaps we should simply make sexist comments and harass them into not attending. Apparently, that must be completely legal since it happens regularly.
September 30th, 2009
For the past month and a half, I’ve been working on putting together a free ruby on rails workshop for women. This event has generated a lot of excitement and already we’re nearing room capacity.
This evening, the announcement was sent out via the internal Harvard ABCD group list which emails all the techies working at Harvard. And I have to admit to being flabbergasted at the following responses sent to the entire ABCD community:
This is blatant sexual discrimination. Are women considered too fragile to learn technical subjects in the same group as men?
For whatever it’s worth I think XXXX is right.
Can you imagine the reaction if there was a technical conference for men only – and a women could only attend as the guest of a man?
There are far too many grants/scholarships/opportunities that are explicitly only open to women or minorities (I’m a minority and it still bothers me). A hypothesis of implicit discrimination against group A does not justify explicit discrimination against group B.
This women’s Ruby workshop exists for the same reason this men’s knitting retreat exists http://www.menwhoknit.com/community/?q=n…). I have never heard a woman knitter complain about a men’s knitting class.
Well, to be fair, I think a male-only knitting group is just as bad an idea as the women-only RoR workshop 
This was my response:
If anyone has concerns about this workshop, please email me directly as I am the coordinator.
But I feel that I must add that for those of you who don’t understand the need for this sort of workshop, you might want to read this keynote talk by Kirrily Robert.
A lot of people, still just don’t get it. Folks don’t want to believe that there are still sexist jokes, pornographic presentations at conferences, harrassment, and all kinds of subtle discrimination going on in the tech community every day. And the only way to combat it, is to encourage mixed gendered environments so that both sexes can learn from one another.
This workshop happens to be very male friendly. At present, the women to men ratio is 2:1. If you can’t find a mother, sister, daughter, friend or stranger to sign up with you for this class, then you have more problems than a one day programming course is gonna fix.
September 29th, 2009
Obie Fernandez blogged about pair programming today in response to a recent New York Times article that featured well known DevChix, Desi McAdam.
I’ve always worked very closely with my colleagues, and I’ve always wanted to try pair programming. After reading Obie’s article I start to understand why I haven’t had much success pushing this idea with employers. But as I was reading, I was reminded about how awesome the concept truly is.
This October, I’m putting together an event at the Berkman Center. I’m working with the RailsBridge folks to create a free ruby on rails one day bootcamp for women to encourage women developers.
Going forward, I was hoping to bring these women together monthly to contribute to open source because I was inspired by a brilliant keynote talk by Kirrily Robert. And I’m thinking about encouraging our newbies to pair with experienced programmers.
I can’t think of a better way to get up to speed quickly than mentoring in this way. While I can’t invest in the right hardware, I figure there’s still a lot to be gained from working on one laptop for an hour.
Are there any other events in Boston where folks pair? How easy it is for a newbie to jump in and join in the fun at these local hackfests? Since I’ve been in maternity land for the last two years, I haven’t had the opportunity to get involved with the Boston rb community as much as I’d like.
Anyone got any insight into the local Boston events? Anyone pair program in their current work environment?
September 22nd, 2009
How do you confirm the presence of one attribute or another? In other words, what if you want to validate that either one of two fields exists? You use Conditional Validation!
So, I need to validate that a user has a login and then also has either an email address or a twitter id. Here’s how I solved it:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
validates_presence_of :login
validates_presence_of :email, :unless => :twitter_account?
def twitter_account?
!twitter_id.nil?
end
end
The :if condition also takes a Proc object, but having it call a method is cleaner and easier to extend. And it can be shared across multiple validations or ipossibly used in other situations.
September 16th, 2009
ActiveSupport::Multibyte is part of Rails so everyone can enjoy multibyte safeness in their applications. Within it, the Chars class enables you to work transparently with UTF-8 encoding in the Ruby String class without having extensive knowledge about the encoding. So while in the past you needed to download special gems and libraries to work with foreign language character sets, now you have a multibyte safe proxy for string methods. Problem solved, right?
While ruby operations like downcase and normalize will keep your utf8 characters intact, you need to be wary when you use a regex.
The Acts-As-Taggable-On plugin calls a cleanup method in the Tag.rb library. See if you can spot the problem…
def self.cleanup(name)
n = name.to_s.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9_-]+/, '').strip
n.blank? ? nil : n
end
The regex is removing non-alphanumeric and underscore characters. So foreign language tags are being stripped away! Instead, you can use the /u regex parameter to parse UTF-8 strings containing multibyte characters:
gsub(/[^a-z0-9_-]+/u, ”)
So, one little character makes this plugin localized by treating Far East (and other) characters as individual characters.
def self.cleanup(name)
n = name.to_s.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9_-]+/u, '').strip
n.blank? ? nil : n
end
Ah, but there’s one caveat here. While alphanumeric tags are created with unwanted special characters stripped out, UTF-8 strings are not. So I could end up with a tag that looks like this:
%$%+عربيةعربيةعربيةعربي
Hmm!
August 18th, 2009
We do a lot of prototyping here at the Berkman Center so we have the luxury of creating databases from scratch. And utilizing your Active Record associations fully is the key to enjoying all the rails yummy goodness.
You can find a really useful rundown on how to get the most out of your table relationships at guides.rubyonrails.org. And I ran across a post by Techknow that does a great job of describing Single Table Inheritance.
Got any other juicy tidbits to share?
August 14th, 2009
Last fall, I used the Restful Authentication with all the Bells and Whistles tutorial for basic authorization and have been quite pleased.
OpenID has been a little trickier to implement because of the relative_url_root error, but that has been fixed by the latest version of the open_id_authentication plugin.
I’m also running into an issue with root_url in open_id_redirect_url.
undefined local variable or method `root_url' for #SessionsController:0x4ae735c
Currently I’m working around it by swapping root_url with requested_url. I’ll have to revisit it later on.
But no where did I find anyone using an Anonymous Login option with the plugin. So I decided to hack it myself.
First I created an “anonymous” user:
User.create :login => 'anonymous', :created_at => Time.new, :updated_at => Time.new, :activated_at => Time.new, :enabled => 1
Next, in authenticated_system.rb I added the methods below:
# Returns the anonymous user
def anonymous_user
User.find_by_login("anonymous")
end
# Returns true or false if the user is anonymous.
def anonymous?
current_user == anonymous_user
end
# Login as anonymous_user
def login_as_anonymous
self.current_user = anonymous_user
end
So now my sessions_controller.rb Create method looks like this:
def create
if params[:anonymous]
login_as_anonymous
successful_login
elsif using_open_id?
open_id_authentication(params[:openid_url])
else
password_authentication(params[:login], params[:password])
end
end
I bet you could bypass creating an anonymous user and simply use User.new. What do you think? Is there a better way?
August 7th, 2009
Luis Lavena of the One-Click Installer project aims to build Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 with MinGW and GCC instead of the old Visual C++ compiler to build Ruby and other native gems. This means significant performance gains on Windows. Check out RubyInstaller for mingw32-based releases that are sure to speed up your tests and more.
Could this mean that rubyists will no longer be smirked at for developing on a Lenovo laptop? Probably not, but check out Antonio Cangiano’s blog on Zen and the Art of Programming for benchmarks and details.
August 4th, 2009
Most ror developers work on Mac or Linux systems. But I’m a Windows user. Not because I have any allegiance to Microsoft but because in my career my clients have been primarily Windows based.
For the most part, I’ve been able to find workarounds and have escaped unscathed from platform issues. But Netbeans has let me down… again.
Netbeans 6.5 gave me grief when trying to use the debugger. You can read about it here. Now, Netbeans 6.7 is giving me trouble checking out my project from subversion. It doesn’t seem to recognize the main project folder and the directory structure is wonky.
After much experimentation and swearing, I bypassed the IDE and instead tried to checkout via the Dos prompt. This results in a unhelpful error message that disguises the root of the problem.
svn: Your .svn/tmp directory may be missing or corrupt; run 'svn cleanup' and try again
svn: Can't open file "long filename": The system cannot find the path specified.
Subversion libraries use relative paths. This is a problem on windows since it only supports path names under the 255 char limit. So, if you are trying to check out a project with a deep directory structure or perhaps you like your folder and file names to be *very* descriptive, you’ll run across an error like the one above.
Yes, this is a limitation of the file system but why can’t Netbeans feed subversion an absolute path when running svn commands instead of a relative path? Then I wouldn’t be wasting my precious dev time on config issues. Arg!
The work around is to use TortoiseSVN on Windows since it feeds subversion absolute paths.
*whew* Another bullet dodged. It’s long passed time to install Linux…
July 14th, 2009
This link was posted to DevChix today and I thought it was a fun take on the current controversies regarding inappropriate behavior happening at geek conferences. Enjoy!
June 22nd, 2009
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