I'm Just Sayin...

codeacademy:

In appreciation of our mentors, their time and knowledge, this is part of an ongoing series to highlight them, their stories, and their advice.

Today we welcome Ginny Hendry (@ginnyhendry),

Currently an independent doing mostly Rails development, Ginny has worked in a variety of roles, a variety of languages, and a variety of platforms in her career but the major theme has been systems integration, that is, figuring out how to customize, link, and extend an texisting system to provide business solutions. She fell in love with Ruby a few years ago and has been enjoying using it and participating in the Ruby community ever since. Javascript is not quite as optimized for programmer happiness as Ruby but she’s learning to like it, too.

Ginny, how did you get into coding?

I was a biology major in college and I was in desperate need of a job my junior year. I went to my advisor, and he said ‘Didn’t you take a programming class?’ and I said ‘yeah’, so I worked 10 hours a week for him writing programs at $2 an hour.

After I graduated, I had a choice, should I work as a programmer or try to find something in biology. The only job offer I had was a medical research lab assistant blinding kittens, and I’m not kidding, that was exactly what the job was. So I thought I didn’t want to be a professional kitten blinder. I decided to stick with the clean coding job.

I’ve noticed how close the Ruby community is.

Ruby people get together all the time. There are conferences in every continent but Antarctica.

It was a little known, boutique language until 2005 when Rails came out, then it exploded. Rails hit at just the right time and with really good marketing: The famous video ‘you can do a blog in 15 minutes’. And it did very well. The timing was really good, the world needed an MVC web framework.

How did you become involved with Code Academy?

I remember at the first demo day, I was talking to Justin Love who is also active in Chicago user groups, and we were reminiscing about sitting in a bar with Neal not that long ago wondering if he’d pull it off, and damn, he did.

A few years ago I wished there was classroom training for me to learn Ruby but it never occurred to me to start my own school. Neal did. I’m very impressed that he did. And I like that it’s classroom training because there’s a lot online but you don’t get the kind of feedback you get with real in-person training, sitting in the room with your fellow students. I have known about it since Neal started making the rounds talking about it when it was just an idea.

What’s your strategy when working with beginners?

I’ve paired with a real beginner, but you have to be careful with that because it’s really easy to say ‘shut up and listen’, especially with a really beginner beginner, so you need to prepare to sit back so they can make contributions to the joint program.

It is interesting to pair with a complete beginner because it comes down to actual training. They can’t just sit down and start programming.

Advice for students post Code Academy?

Well the main thing for the students is to not stop. It’s so easy to take a course, read a book, look at a tutorial and think ‘okay, it’s really interesting’ but if you don’t practice, it’s gone. The thing is they need to keep going.

It’s like learning to play the piano. You can listen to lectures, read books, but when you sit down at the keyboard, the reading doesn’t get you anywhere. To produce something, don’t stop, keep cranking out programs and you’ll get better and better as you do more.

Textmate or Vim?

Vim.

I’m too cheap to buy TextMate. And it wasn’t upgraded for awhile, so I worried about it. I thought they’d take my money and just let it rot. VI’s been around for so long, I already had some knowledge of it.

Being a female in technology

There aren’t that many women in open source.

Why not?

There’s about 25% of women in IT generally, but only 3% in open source. And the IT numbers are worse than they used to be. I think there are probably two reasons. One, especially in open source, for whatever reason, it started out being almost all young men. So people who don’t fit that group will see only one demographic and think they would fit in better with another group. There’s no hostility on either side, it’s just about homogeneous groups tend to remain that way.

Another characteristic of open source, it’s open to everybody so if there’s one jerk making some people unwelcome, there’s no way to throw him out.

Is our generation helping?

No, it’s not generational at all. I think it actually can be solved a little bit at a time. If there is one jerk on a discussion group, then everyone needs to tell him to ‘shut up already’ but that’s tough to do because your average nerd avoids confrontation.

The solution is for everybody to not put up with it.

What Chicago resources have you found inspirational or influential?

There’s a general hacknight designed for beginners, every Thursday. That one is specifically a women’s group.

But in general we have the Chicago Ruby meetup which meets three times a month, including hacknight and a suburban meetup It’s a pretty active group. There’s Geekfest and Code and Coffee weekly, and 8th Light Friday lunch and learn.

Programmers have a habit of sitting hunched over their computers for hours at a time. It’s a good thing to live in a city and be able to get out to meet with other programmers.

Resources recommended by Ginny:

• Meetup: Woman Developers
• Meetup: Chicago RoR Outreach Workshop for Women
• Ginny’s advice to Ruby beginners

Thank you so much Ginny, we really appreciate your time, feedback and support. It’s been great seeing you around the CA space, working with students, and joining us during class.

Professional kitten blinder?!? Wow, glad Ginny chose a different path.