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hi thank you so much for coming we've got a really great panel of people who have some wonderful information to
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share with you we all know since we're here today to talk about developer
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happiness and we all know that the best way to make developers happy is kitten
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right very very cute kitten so we have to include some kitten but we beyond that
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we can get involved in our community and giving up your time to do a great thing
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for somebody else is a really awesome way to keep you happy and keep you from
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burning out in your job I'm lucky to have these wonderful panelists to give us some information about how to get
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started so I'm Holly Shan Dorf during my last week of boot camp I went
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to a an event called Ruby for good and it's a three-day sort of retreat and we
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work on projects for nonprofits during the day and then we have dinner together and in the evenings we play games we
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meet people we build community we find mentors that's where I found my mentor
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and it's just a really amazing place to be and so I met some of these people
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through Ruby for good and I was really excited about that experience I've gone
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several times this year I'm actually going to run a project and it's just something I feel really passionate about and I wanted to share with some of you
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guys so I'm going to have that panelists introduce themselves hello I'm Terry and
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Kasich and I met Polly at Ruby for good and also Shawn and some other people I
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think here from Ruby for good I work for github and other ways that I get
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involved are iMac organizer of jingle girls in Portland and what also I do I
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write intro intermediate programming workshops like one is coming up later today hey
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I'm Sean I organized that roofer getting but this is just a for good panel so I
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work for the government I try to make things better for the government despite the new person in
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charge hi
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whoa hi I'm Sara I have actually no connection to Ruby for good at all I've
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never been it's been on my list of things to do for years and I've never actually been to it maybe maybe next
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year this year it's during the last week of school for my kids so always something Oh connection yet right I am
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the chief consultant at deaf mind and my non-profit work tends to take the form of this conference and rubyconf I am
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part of the organizing team for that and I also in 2009 founded an organization called rails bridge which was one of the
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first groups that started to do workshops aiming to get women in under
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other sort of under represented folks into the rails community through workshops and so since then there's been
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a lot of other groups that have taken that model and done really interesting things with it both within the Ruby
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community like with rails girls but then also outside of the Ruby community so for example the Django girls is a
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similar idea there have been similar ones for like JavaScript and so on and recently we formed an umbrella
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organization because if you're a developer you don't really want to figure out how to be a for nonprofit
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organization you just want to do a workshop right and so now we've got an umbrella organization so now we've got
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we've got like go bridge and mobile bridge and we just did a first scala bridge so we've been trying to help
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other communities take that model and do that also
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so now we're going to chat I just have everyone's names up there so we can remember so Sarah can we start with you
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and can you give us all some advice on how do we figure out something to get started with I mean I guess yeah so it's
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a really interesting question I think that for me I wanted to I wanted to
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create the workshop that I wish had existed a couple years previously so I
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was coming back into the workforce after my daughter was born and I had been a
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Java developer and I had a couple years gap on my resume and suddenly no one
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would interview me and it was like I know wouldn't it be awesome if there was like a workshop where I could direct all
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of my mom friends that are in like very similar situations once they get to the point where they want to work again so they could update their skills and then
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they could come back into the workforce and do this like hot new thing and so that's that's where railsbridge
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basically came from for me was like I want this to I wish that hitted the City existed two years ago so I think I want
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to make it now and that's where a lot of the motivation for my stuff comes from
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sure um I I'd like to say too that it's really easy to get involved like you
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don't need like if you're right in if you're even if you're in a bootcamp like you you have the skills right now like
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nuts like you know like we've worked with a lot of nonprofits and generally
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like the kind of things we're building them or just like really really simple like crud apps like we're replacing
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processes that are you know being done on pen and paper and like just just
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horrible processes like I could tell stories oh just make your heads I'll shake as far as getting started
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volunteering my experience like coming out of college like really really
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wanting to get involved in like getting more women and other runners represented folks edittext I just went to a million
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meetups and like asked people who needed help and that was a little too much initially but
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I went to all with meetups I like found out the things that I like doing the things I did not like doing and did more of the things I liked and
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lots of things I didn't like I think that's a really good point so finding things that spark your fire
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and get you excited are really good ideas so Tyrion have you ever
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experienced some obstacles getting involved in something that you were excited to get involved with but then
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you came across some obstacles and what did you do I guess obstacles I the first
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groups that I got involved with were mostly dealing with getting young girls
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interested into tech which I really care about but I realized after doing that for a couple years that I do not have
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the energy level for getting little girls into tech and like keeping them away from scissors and all that fun
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stuff so that's kind of obstacle ultimately now I work with grown women
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who know how to use scissors so like an obstacle or like a learning situation I
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guess is what I would call that yeah I
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think for me I started out in my volunteer work by doing working with an organization that does like a summer
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camp for high school girls and it was really rewarding in some ways but then
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on the other ways like it was they wanted me to write a curriculum for a class and then you know I again in a
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similar situation it was like I didn't you know I high school girls are their own sort of species I feel like almost
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and I almost have one so I'm yeah I was going to be exciting my daughter's 11 right now and I found
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that it there was a lot for me to learn just about dealing with kids and at the
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same times I was trying to learn about how do you teach technical topics because I had not done that before either and so you know I kept at it for
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a while because I felt like I was sort of obligated to or cuz I said I would and then I just started getting less and
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less out of it and then eventually just decided you know what I should probably just let someone do it who's got who
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wants to do this right who's got the energy and the drive to specifically do this and
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they're going to be way better at it than I am
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so Sean we have heard a lot about Ruby for good and how awesome it is but it's
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sold out for this year and so if people want to do reefer good they have to wait all the way til next year so give some
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ideas for other things that people can get involved in so you can get involved
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remotely like we have like it's helping nonprofits this is a pending that does float your boat hop on our stock channel
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we have or go to our github pages look at all issues we tag them help on it and try to tag them as well like a newbie
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good first commit and and jump in there because yeah like and all our
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stakeholders we try and get them in there commenting as well so you'll you'll see Rachel from the diaper bank saying like hey could this possible and
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and it's just really wonderful fulfilling to getting that destructive interaction I think I think caring was
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an idea too I do um thank you're referring to I think you're referring to there is a
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Python offshoot that would be for good happening in Portland in July I can't
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remember the website things code for goods that I oh so that's that's happening soon I think it's what you're
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talking about too much sure okay
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so sometimes when you get started in something it's a little difficult to
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figure out how much commitment is involved and how much time you might have to dedicate to it so say or do you
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have any tips for sort of up front trying to figure out what level of
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commitment is going to be required I think the so one thing that that I
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found helpful in the number of the groups that I've worked with is that they have these things like you were saying it's like good first commit or
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like easy thing to start with I find that really useful and what offense
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Amina is not necessarily that like I want to do that thing but what it says to me is that they've thought about which pieces of work they could sort of
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break off and give to someone who's new which i think is a process that a lot of groups a lot of
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times don't really go through and I you know a trails bridge we've been we've
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tried hard to have a revolving door meaning like if you're a student this
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time we explicitly encourage them to come back the next time as a TA and as a TA you don't have to teach the class
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you're just sitting in the class with the instructor and your role is just to provide another voice another
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interpretation another way of thinking about the concept that they're trying to work on and we found that to be
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incredibly valuable just because a lot of times the folks who come back the very next time as a TA are they're
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they're closer in mindset to the people in the class than the instructor is and so they can often for you know a
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perspective so that the teacher can't offer any more and so we try hard to
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make that a fairly low commitment deal right you just show up for the day and you sit in the class and you sort of
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comment on things and the teacher may ask you to give your perspective on things once in a while and so we try and
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have this sort of ratcheting up level of commitment as you as you want to do it and I also think it's okay for you to
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come and go in a project in volunteer work in general sometimes I have a bunch
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of room forward in my life and sometimes I don't and so I go through cycles for
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sure of like I'm really involved I'm on the board I'm going to every meeting and
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then there'll be six months or a year where I'm just like FML ok y'all can handle this for a while right because
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I've got a kid in middle school or something like that something will happen and I think that that yeah it's a
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lot like an open source project a lot of these things and that we do need to be cognizant of people's waxing and waning
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availability and energy and interest in helping and so I think that if you've
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got a group that has sort of thought through that and a lot of the times these groups that are run like open
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source projects because open source has already sort of gone through that thought process and a lot of times that
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the that does actually exist and so for me it's the process of like sort of looking for these levels that they've
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set up I think that's really good and like being honest with yourself with how
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much time you actually have and I recently went through a situation with a group that I volunteer for and I'd
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volunteered to help run a class and it kept getting delayed and then it was
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running into other things I had volunteered for so at some point I had to say you know what I'm not going to be
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available to do this but this time maybe I can do it next time or something like that so I think being honest with
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yourself and then just just being really open with other organizers of the thing that you're doing is really helpful I
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also had a like lean on your community like we have probably the best community
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out of any like ehh talked about that like the Ruby community the rails community is just full of awesome people
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and so like if it's a if it's an open source project like ask the person maintaining it like you know this is too
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hard for me can I do this this is my skill level if you want to build something for someone you know go to a meet-up ask people like
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hey I'm trying to figure out how to build this there's a lot of helpful people and everyone's going to help you also sometimes it's good to pick the
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thing that's too hard and then find someone who will care with you and then you can learn then it's like a win-win situation cuz you're you're helping
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someone you're learning you're growing and you're developing a mentor relationship so it'd be helpful all around I just wanted to add a thing
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about on through Django Girls we really try to push not like shove but like
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encourage people who just went through the tutorial that they should become piays like Sarah mentioned at the next
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workshop and there's a lot of reluctance there but people who are very close to like the beginning of learning a program
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are often the best resource because they know what it's like to be a beginner they might they're less inclined to be
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like why don't you know this like don't you know Stack Overflow is so that's like our teaching especially is a really
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great way for someone who's starting out in text to get involved the first time
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that I did a realist rage workshop was the first time I'd ever really taught anybody programming and we went along
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for about 20 minutes before one of the women women my class was like can I ask
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a dumb question I was like sure and no question is done well watch like what's a variable and I was like well it's a
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thing in your program with a name and that was
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pretty much the quality of my explanation but fortunately there was another person in the room who had more
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recently you know because at that point it had been 20 years since I had processed what a variable was and I just
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couldn't really underneath everything and but the other person in the room who
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was more recently become a programmer was able to just be like okay so imagine
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you're in preschool and you've got a big wall of cubbies and one for each kid right and like what it is is you can put
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different things in it and I was just like wow that's a great explanation actually that's really cool and it
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resonated with the people there and so I learned a bunch about it about how to teach these things just based on
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listening to other people explain it cool so our next question is for Tyrion
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you can get us started how do you recognize when it's time to take a break and why why is that really important
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I feel like this doesn't really apply to programming specifically but in your life when you're doing something that
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makes you unhappy you should probably stop doing it and that sounds really obvious but like I feel like as
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programmers and like people who want to help it's hard for us to take that step back and see like okay this is not good
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for us but I think someone mentioned already that like you can you can take a
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step back from open source and the community and it will it will continue to survive without you and you can always come back I also feel Specialist
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programmers run a lot of pressure like there's always something new to learn new new jobs for framework do new new
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language new everything and and you know you see those those charts of what it takes to be a full stack developer and
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it's like all these interconnected things and it can get pretty overwhelming and with a lot of pressure
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on ourselves to you know to feel like we have to know all these things but um I
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don't I think it's good just to disconnect to read a book read a lot of books and yeah like Karen said
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and I think that it's one of the things that's been interesting for me is is to
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figure out that that there's a lot of different ways to help and that some of
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them I'm better at than I am at others and the ones that give me an overtime
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you know I think is especially because it's not you know that often times there
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are issues with our job or on a project we don't like like things are making me grumpy like work that's sort of taking
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energy out of my life and a lot of times the volunteer work I do is part of what puts that energy back it's part of what
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gets me interested again just in tech in general and keeps me going when parts of
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my life are draining energy which happens with any job right there will be
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periods where that will happen and a one thing that took me a while to figure out
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though is that like that drain can go the other way if I'm working on a volunteer project that is not giving me
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energy there's always going to be periods where you're like okay so I'm just going to go through these eight billion issues and
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like tag them all or whatever but I think that the you know overall it's it's it's good to sort of assess once in
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a while like is this work that I'm doing still feeding into that energy cycle in
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a positive way or does it feel like it's draining I wasn't reminded by what Sarah was
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saying by DHH this morning talking about the juice arrow and how there's an element of juice arrow work and
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everything that you do and I feel like that's often less so in community
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involvement so you can go to work and work on your your juice robot and then volunteer and know that okay I'm helping
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someone's life's become better and that's very useful so Shawn can you talk
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about some of the benefits to the person themselves or to their career maybe so
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I'm a big proponent of gather the benefits of getting involved and stuff like this and I think the most tangible
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one is it's open source and you know whether whether we like it or not kind of github is our resume now and so people laughing
00:20:05.410
but it's true you know like you well like to an extent like you're going to
00:20:11.050
go you're going to apply for a job and like if you're just out of a boot camp or something you know this is this is
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something tangible you can you can point to you that they can look at because it's really hard to get value from you
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know doing the coding Fibonacci or something with someone and you know if you've actually built something that
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they can look at so you can talk about you know like you're disagreeing with me
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but like if there's real code you have out there in the world then people can that you can have in a conversation with
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someone but I do you think that it is
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really useful especially as you're starting out right to have some stuff up on github that it's not programming challenges or school you know boot camp
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projects and things like that I do think though that we tend to over value code
00:21:05.920
contributions just in general in terms of when we talk about volunteer work we
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talk about giving back when we talk about public personas I remember that the they we used to do a
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thing called the Ruby heroes award and one thing they would do is they would put up everyone's github contribution
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graphs of the people that won the award and typically it was all green meaning like they had contributed all the stuff
00:21:31.240
to all these projects and that's super cool and then and then then I won one and they put up my github contribution
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graph and there was like one little green square on there for like the last year and you know we don't necessarily
00:21:44.530
have ways to measure sometimes the impact of the work that people do outside of contributing code and and I
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know that github is thinking about this and I I don't know who knows you would know better than I do yeah why don't you
00:21:58.750
take over at this point this is like outside of the realm of get up at this point because everyone uses it but like
00:22:05.050
github does not want you to treat your contribution graph it's like a measure of your worth as a human being like it's
00:22:10.630
supposed to be like fun little game early oh look it's a line of green squares but it's like
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gotten out of hand so Sarah you talked a
00:22:23.710
little bit about contributing to projects that are like draining you
00:22:29.350
instead of fulfilling you so what do you do when you get involved in a project and it's just not a good fit anymore I
00:22:36.480
mean I think that a lot of projects are used to the idea because we all are coming from this open source world we're
00:22:42.880
used to the idea of like contributors are going to come and go and the project itself needs to be resilient to that
00:22:48.120
movement just like our projects that work need to be resilient to turnover right in the
00:22:54.010
same way and and I think that you know
00:22:59.530
there there's there's certainly been occasions when people will just sort of drop out and just stop showing up in the slack channel and you know stop
00:23:06.790
returning emails and stuff and I generally tend to take that as a sign that they're just overwhelmed right so
00:23:13.030
they that I let it get to the point without checking in with them that they got overwhelmed so I don't tend to think
00:23:19.330
that they're like bad people or whatever but I tend to think that they're they just got overwhelmed and they couldn't
00:23:24.820
handle it anymore and they checked out and so I try to you know I try to check
00:23:30.880
in with people as a result of that and and you know be like hey so how does this feeling for you do you want you
00:23:36.550
know does what are you enjoying what you're doing you want to do something different I think that more and more
00:23:42.280
projects people that run these projects are are in that boat right so they're
00:23:47.800
going to be pretty sympathetic to being like hey I'm overwhelmed right now I can't really take this on I'm having
00:23:55.390
trouble keeping up with whatever it is I would love to just hand this off and do
00:24:02.380
a clean handoff and if you find someone you want me to sit with them for a couple hours and we can you know I could
00:24:07.390
show them what I do or whatever but i you know and i think that most project maintainers i feel like both in sort of
00:24:14.290
open source code related things but then also in teaching and other things are not necessarily expecting you're going
00:24:21.070
to stay forever but i think it's just you know like anything else it's a communicate cycle yeah and I think a lot of times
00:24:28.330
they'll be grateful to hear like okay you're overwhelmed you didn't just disappear on me and depend enough notice to try and find someone else so we
00:24:36.850
wanted to make sure we left enough time if you guys have questions so there are there any questions ask some more
00:24:43.270
questions if if you guys can out because anything you want okay so the question
00:24:48.670
was where do you start when it's not when you're in a community that's not obvious where to start
00:24:54.280
so I recently visited my college which is in the middle of Iowa and there's not
00:24:59.320
a whole lot of tech going on there so I told students there if they want to get more involved in programming stuff
00:25:04.600
that there's lots of things you can do remotely like because they're college students in Carroll at video games
00:25:10.870
what's the most part I've pointed in it like mobile game jams and things of that nature but there's also non videogame
00:25:16.510
things like that I also think you might be surprised if you like held a meet-up
00:25:22.840
in in the DC area we we scheduled the meetup for out in the Eastern Shore of
00:25:28.600
Maryland which was like 200 miles away just don't hold meet up with a friend of ours who lived out there and so like the
00:25:35.320
meetup was coming to him rather than him coming in the meetup but like the strangest thing happened because we held a meetup out there and it showed up on
00:25:41.140
meetup calm did all these local people just showed up too so you may be
00:25:46.180
surprised that there's a lot more people nearby than you suspect especially with so many people working
00:25:52.000
remotely these days I think that a lot of times there may not be an explicit community in a rural area but I'll bet
00:25:57.550
you there's probably at least a couple of folks hacking on code working from home and sometimes they are super
00:26:03.580
excited to like you know if I I have a friend that lived for a while in Eastern
00:26:09.730
Washington and she would go to meetups for basically any technology even when
00:26:15.520
she wasn't working with necessarily because he just wanted to like hang out with other tech people like bounce ideas off them in general and so it can be it
00:26:22.810
can be illuminating to to try and have a technique up and see what happens you may pull some people out of the woodwork
00:26:28.630
that you weren't expecting or you might find in your community that there are people who are interested in learning
00:26:34.120
Ruby on Rails so you might even if it was a small thing even if you like had a small workshop and then you
00:26:41.260
can introduce some people to this whole new like career and they might have some interests when I checked in here the
00:26:46.900
other day that last night at the hotel the gentleman behind the desk is like
00:26:52.960
I'm really interested in this coding thing and so he like really wanted some more information about that and I think you know that exists everywhere and so
00:26:59.920
that's an opportunity and then also just getting involved in volunteer work like
00:27:05.800
in whatever capacity so I volunteer at a food pantry in a soup kitchen and then
00:27:10.840
it's like crazy Excel spreadsheet database like keeping track of things they hand count things and so we're
00:27:17.350
doing a project this year at Ruby for good for the soup kitchen that I volunteer for but I'm sure if you got
00:27:22.810
involved in some sort of volunteering role you'll quickly find that they don't have money to like buy apps and things
00:27:29.560
to to make their process better and easier and faster for all the volunteers
00:27:35.710
they have so there would be a huge opportunity there and then maybe you could recruit some people in your community or even remote to do something
00:27:43.300
for something that's like local in your community okay so the question was how
00:27:48.940
do you recognize the people who are in your group how do you give back to them
00:27:54.340
and recognize them for contributing hugs
00:27:59.820
lots of hugs Oh swag sir yeah but everybody figured you'll see me
00:28:05.170
chasing people down to hide lonely that's a joke you know I think this is something that we have not has not done
00:28:12.940
a great job at with some of the organizations I've been a part of and I think because maybe we come from most of
00:28:21.010
us come from a programming background and not so many of us from kind of a nonprofit administration background where and where that kind of stuff is is
00:28:27.520
more universally understood that is necessary so but some of the things we've done is like we've printed special
00:28:33.160
t-shirts for people we've we made like little necklaces with the railsbridge
00:28:39.010
logo on it for our board members we gave people hoodies if they were if I thought
00:28:45.690
you know I forget what it was was like teach five workshops and we'll send you a hoodie kind of deal
00:28:51.850
and but I think that like that is definitely an area in which most of us
00:28:57.970
could use help because I think that you know that cycle of like we appreciate you we know you're doing this and you
00:29:04.420
don't have to I think it's important and it's a loop that we should learn to close better I had a similar sort of
00:29:12.880
experience in Django Girls where we've had almost five workshops and I wanted
00:29:18.070
to recognize people who've coached it one two three four workshops and so we had the budget for hoodies or anything
00:29:24.370
cool like that so we bought floppy discs and painted them like gold silver bronze to the different like number of times
00:29:30.970
people volunteered and like put rhinestones on that's our thing rhinestones yeah I was that I would actually like that better than a hoodie
00:29:37.030
you can't wear it but people can really love them and then also like was less of
00:29:44.530
a physical manifestation of your appreciation just like reaching out to people like hey I really really appreciated you helping us so many times
00:29:50.680
or often like I noticed you didn't apply to be a coach this time is it you have something going on in your life you're
00:29:56.470
like worried you didn't do great because you did great there's like little things like that are really great so Chris is
00:30:04.900
giving a talk on organizing he's going to do a panel talk on organizing and so I would highly recommend going to that
00:30:11.560
doesn't mean you guys can't answer the question but they'll be they're going to go away more into depth on sponsors and
00:30:19.510
organizing and all that sort of stuff so I think that would be a great resource for you do ego sorry the question the
00:30:26.740
question was how do you manage if you do get people to come to a meet-up how do you manage the meetup and I think the
00:30:33.220
interesting part of that question for me is is what's the difference between managing folks on a team for work for pay and the difference between managing
00:30:39.790
it between that and managing a team of volunteers and I have found that there is a significant amount of overlap the
00:30:47.890
main difference that I see is that volunteer work tends to be much less real time in terms of the interactions
00:30:54.490
and the reaction to it whereas you can have a meeting one day and things shift the following day at
00:31:01.360
work a lot of times it's much of much longer feedback loop you're like oh we'll have this email and then we'll figure something out and
00:31:07.210
then a week later we'll do it and for me that that sometimes makes it hard for me to pick up and remember kind of where
00:31:14.019
where we were on this journey of trying to make this thing happen and the other
00:31:20.950
thing is that people do kind of piece in and out more than they would do at work
00:31:27.159
and maybe this is the advantage of living in the San Fransisco bubble but that happens on my team in San Francisco too and I just expect it right like
00:31:33.879
people are going to you know they're going to work the average tenure of someone at a tech job in San Francisco
00:31:39.639
right now is under 18 months and so people are just like oh my buddy he's doing startup I'm just going to go work
00:31:45.249
on that for a couple months and they know that they can just get another job or they can come back and work with me again they want to after their startup
00:31:52.330
you know crashes and burns and or is sold to Twitter it's always the hope
00:31:57.519
right and so I think that yeah there's I
00:32:02.590
feel like they're almost converging right there's sort of this we've we've been working in the tech
00:32:07.629
community on building teams that are resilient to turnover which has a lot in common with building a team and sort of
00:32:14.320
hurting the volunteers along I have
00:32:21.129
never been a real software manager but something that seems to be important to those folks that I think is important in
00:32:27.369
volunteering is like the bus sector if you're familiar with that where you know
00:32:33.580
if someone gets burnt out or decides not to do this anymore what's going to happen and I think in both those situations just documenting religiously
00:32:40.269
is very very important I was very fortunate that the former organized organizer bingo girls Portland left so
00:32:48.220
many emails I can copy and paste and just documentation on the way that she led the organization so it's not
00:32:53.850
confusing or mysterious ever yeah so the
00:32:59.830
question is are there examples of companies who have been who've done a good job of integrating some of this
00:33:07.809
volunteer work into the company is that right yeah yeah into the product okay so
00:33:14.499
I can kind of speak to that a little bit like I know github actually every is a February their volunteer month which they get 20%
00:33:21.579
of their time to just work on open source projects and you know Ruby for goods benefited from that because we
00:33:27.789
always point them at route for good projects needing help and in February we see a lot of contributions from getup
00:33:33.609
people which is awesome I know customink does skills based volunteering which is really cool and another awesome company
00:33:42.009
that's doing it I want to give a shout out to but I can't remember my company gave us like one one day a month which
00:33:47.709
isn't a whole lot but at least it helps us get more people like in the company
00:33:52.809
involved and stuff like that as well yeah I know Salesforce and I'm not sure if this carries over to all like Heroku
00:33:59.649
and all that stuff so I have a couple friends that work in Salesforce proper and Salesforce actually gives them a certain number of days per year sort of
00:34:05.529
like vacation time but like it's non-profit work time and so they can use that to volunteer at their kids school or they can use it to work on a project
00:34:12.609
and so what often happens there is that people will schedule to use that time at the same time so they can work in a
00:34:18.700
group on a project that they're interested in and so sometimes even just providing that time and then just kind
00:34:24.970
of seeing what people do with it can can be interesting so I think that's all the time we have but thank you so much for
00:34:31.240
coming and hopefully you've had some ideas spark and you can go out and make
00:34:36.279
the world a better place thank you thank you and a round of applause please for
00:34:43.599
Polly for putting all this together this is kind of work