Dangerous Ideas

Wow, that was the most fun I’ve ever had deciding not to go to a conference! Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in trading me their time for an all-expenses paid trip to RailsConf. I’ve met a lot of people I think I’ll be working with in the near future, including Sarah Mei, the person I’m sending to RailsConf.

It’s funny … just the other day I was talking with Jason Wong about recruiting strategies. I was actually offering to sell him by RailsConf ticket. I knew he had been interested in going but was too busy to really think about it during his run for a position on the local Democratic Central Committee. Turns out Jason couldn’t go, either, but after the conversation with him, I thought, hey, why not try to combine transferring the ticket with trying to find some cool Ruby and Rails programmers to work with?

Some of the people who can benefit the most from the inspiration and knowledge exchange that takes place at conferences or seminars often can’t afford to go to them. Either they’re starting out as programmers or, like Sarah, they’re seasoned developers who are relatively new to Ruby and don’t work for a company that will sponsor them to go to something like RailsConf. Many people in this situation are women, who I’m especially sympathetic to since seeing our numbers decline so much in programming (for the curious, I didn’t choose Sarah based on gender; I chose her because she has great skills, works with non-profits, could take the time off, can work legally in the U.S., lives in San Francisco – a perfect combination!).

It was especially great how many people were attracted to the social justice parts of my post. That was so cool! There were several people that were actually more interested in just working with me than RailsConf itself.

It was all serendipity this time, but the experience was so good that I’m thinking of offering one or more all expenses trip(s) to RubyConf in exchange for programming hours, too, assuming there’s interest.

If the logistics work out, I’d also like to combine the offer with mentoring by an experienced Ruby programmer. Again, the offer will be open to everyone, but I’ll of course be making an extra effort to let women and other underrepresented programmers know about the offer.

I posted my original offer on Ruby mailing lists plus also on Systers (where Sarah saw it) and LinuxChix. Any suggestions for other places to post offers like this that will reach women programmers and programmers of color?