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my name is elisha and i'm really nervous
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i'm gonna hide here
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so i'm the co-organizer of rails girl
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singapore and i have like zero
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programming background i studied
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psychology and was not technical at all
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so the best technical skills i have was
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to create that that picture you see over
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there using powerpoint and pain i'm like
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really proud i was really proud of
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myself
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but after linda's talk like maybe not so
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much
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so i picked up programming when i
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couldn't find a tech co-founder for my
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startup and that's when i was exposed
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into to the ruby and rails community and
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that's when i found out it's such a nice
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community like i mean the software is
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free there's like tons of free tutorials
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people are nice and they really help me
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out when i have a bug
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when i couldn't figure out why my code
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doesn't work or when i couldn't figure
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out why my code works so people really
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helped me out and you know so i started
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thinking like for a community that's
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given me so much how can i give back
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so i don't agree that i need to have
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become a certain kind of person or to
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have a certain specific level of skills
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before i could you know call myself good
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enough to start giving back contribute
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meaningfully so i started looking around
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on what i can help and here's a list of
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what i found that you can contribute
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even though you can't code
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so the first thing is organize events
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so the conferences like this don't
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organize by itself
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at least not yet until some someone
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codes something for it
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so
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conferences like this are a way for
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community to get together and share
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knowledge and it's mostly run by
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volunteers like winston is a volunteer
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so it's anna
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so a way for you to contribute without
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code is to organize something like this
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or it doesn't have to be as big as this
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it could be also a small meetup or just
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like a hack session
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if event organizing isn't your crop of
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tea you can also try helping out at
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events
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so there's a couple of ways that you can
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help out at events so the first thing
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like you can see on the picture is you
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can design like t-shirts and stickers
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for our conference so darlene and tenman
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actually designed the
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our collateral for this year and last
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year
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or you could emcee an event like this
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like anna here she's also in the picture
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and and winston
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or you could talk to your boss about
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hosting a meetup in your office so tanya
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from thoughtworks has been doing that
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for for real cigars in singapore and
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lawrence also volunteered as a
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photographer and usually help us with
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paypal
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so another thing you can do is to share
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your knowledge
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you don't need to have you don't need to
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know a lot in order to share what you
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know
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some ways you can share what you know is
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by teaching someone it could be at a
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global organization like rails girls or
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rails bridge
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it could be just like helping someone
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out to fix a bug on stack overflow or or
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you see them like struggling around
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yeah you could even share your sessions
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share what you've learned at a
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conference and meet up or just write
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about it
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so if you
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are un comfortable with sharing your
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knowledge or you really think that you
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have no knowledge to share you can help
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by sharing someone else's knowledge
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so here's some examples that can be done
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you can interview programmers so others
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could learn from their experiences an
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example is rebuild by sayani it's a
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podcast and on the website you can also
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find all the events tech events that are
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happening in singapore so that's a great
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way for for you to contribute another
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thing is another way is by filming all
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the presentations that had that
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that
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are done during meetups so michael
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michael from um i can't remember where
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you worked so
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sorry
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but but that's not important the
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important thing is that he has been
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going to different meetups and to film
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everything down to upload then on
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youtube so that even if you can't make
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it for the meetup you can actually learn
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from it so that's great so check it out
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engineers.sg
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he's also looking for volunteers you can
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find him outside
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so the last thing is you know little
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things count
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um you can just contribute to the ruby
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community by being nice to one another
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just
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make this a friendly environment welcome
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a welcoming environment for everyone
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you could ask questions after a talk
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uh you could even just pick up trash or
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like clean up uh pack up the chairs
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after a meet up and that's that's really
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a kind of contributing to the community
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as well
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so
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yeah i think that contributing to the
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community goes beyond writing codes
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documentation or fixing bugs it's more
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like creating a way for the community to
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get together share knowledge is about
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welcoming people into the community as
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well
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so i hope this talk gives you an idea of
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how you can contribute right now and to
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encourage you to get started
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so
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thank you for your contributions
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you