When Ciara Burkett saw the movie ‘Hackers’ at age five, she told her mother she wanted to be just that – a hacker. But it wasn’t until exploring liberal arts in college that she remembered her early fascination with tech. So she gave finally it a try. Now a Meteor developer and teacher, she tells us about organizing tech meetups, why she loves the beginner-friendly, javascript framework, and shares some of her own struggles learning to code.

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Shoutouts

• Learn Meteor.js Properly (Ciara)
• Hacking Passion (Saron)
• CodeNewbie Discourse (Saron)
• Worldwide Meteor Day – New York (Ciara)
• Fundamental Qualities of Good Programmers (Ciara)

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Rachel Nabors started as a cartoonist. But when she needed jaw surgery and didn’t have the health insurance to get it, she decided it was time to get more lucrative skills. Now a cartoonist, developer, and speaker, she tells us about her transition into programming, how to tell stories with code, and what it means to be an interaction developer.

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• Don’t Do What You Love
• CodePen
• How To Win Friends And Influence People
• Understanding Comics
• Learn To Program – Chris Pine
• CSS Sprite Sheet Animations with steps()
• Skrollr.js
• Javascript Enlightenment

Shoutouts

• Creative Gap (Saron)
• Spike Lab Internship (Saron)
• CSS Shapes (Saron)
• Black Brick Road (Rachel)
• Web Animation API (Rachel)
• Practical Cartooning For Technical Folk (Rachel)
• Val Head – UI animation (Rachel)
• Sara Soueidan (Rachel)

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Marty Haught, director of Ruby Central, the non-profit that organizes Rails Conf and Ruby Conf has read and reviewed over 1,000 talk proposals, and organize several regional and national conferences for developers. We talk about how to write a great talk proposal, how to make conferences a welcome and inclusive space for all developers, and how to prepare for your next big talk.

Shoutouts

• Exercism.io (Marty)
• RubyQuiz (Marty)
• Atom – text editor (Marty)
• Sandi Metz (Marty)
• Outlander Series (Marty)
• Speaking.io (Saron)
• What I learned from reading 429 conference proposals (Saron)
• Lanyrd (Saron)

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Self-taught developer Kinsey Ann Durham didn’t stop at learning to code. In two years, she’s spoken at tech conferences around the world, started an organization in Kenya to help women entrepreneurs (and of course wrote the software it runs on), and organizes events focused on women in tech in her town in Colorado. We talk about what it was like to give her first tech talk, how to use your coding skills for social good causes, and how she handled someone telling her that she should be a secretary instead. Glad she didn’t listen.

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• RailsBridge
• Women Who Code
• Kubmo
• CodeTriage
• Thoughtbot Apprenticeship

Shoutouts

• Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby (Kinsey)
• Thoughtbot’s Upcase (Kinsey)
• Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial (Kinsey)
• Chris Pine’s Learn To Program (Kinsey)
• Advice And Crap For Young Creators (Saron)
• ConFreaks (Saron)
• OverAPI (Saron)

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