Community Involvement

The Portland Ruby Brigade is a user group for Ruby programmers in the Portland area. They meet monthly; I typically attend 3-5 meetings a year. I facilitated the June 2011 meeting, and as of summer 2011, I've been helping organize the beginners' meetup.

Building on material from a Lunch and Learn presentation I gave to my coworkers in spring 2011, and then presented at BarCamp Portland and Cascadia RubyConf (both liste below), I wrote think-like-a-git.net as a standalone website to help people increase their confidence in working with Git.

Code'n'Splode is a user group formed in 2007 to support the participation of women in the Portland tech community. They meet monthly; I typically attend 2-3 meetings a year.

Cascadia RubyConf (website) was the first regional Ruby conference to be held in the Pacific Northwest. I went as an attendee, and when one of the keynote speakers used less than half of his timeslot, the organizers asked if anyone had submitted a talk proposal that didn't get selected. I volunteered, and gave a compressed version of my "Think Like (a) Git" talk to about 150 Rubyists... with no time to prepare. The 25-minute session was recorded and is available at Confreaks; I've also mirrored the videos here.
[Videos: 1920x1080 (561MB), 1280x720 (195MB), 640x360 (50MB)]

Gave "Think Like (a) Git" presentation to about 20 attendees at a local unconference.

Inspired by an offhand comment on the Ruby Show podcast, I wrote a Rails plugin called HighlandAR as a joke. The hosts were so amused that not only did they feature the plugin in episode 153, they also created a Hall of Fame page to put it on.

Entered a live coding competition at FOSCON 2008. (Challenge was to develop a complete web-enabled recipe database in 20 minutes.) With partner Brian Artiaco, won first place.

With Brian Artiaco, gave a one-hour "Introduction to Ruby on Rails" presentation. (Presentation and code were put together in two days; the original presenter cancelled on short notice and the conference organizers contacted the Portland Ruby Brigade for volunteers.)

Attended one-day unconference. (Wiki page)

Coached a team of four Rosemary Anderson High School students in OGPC 1.0.'

Proofreading, Windows installation, hardware troubleshooting, Access assistance and website updates.

Troubleshooting, Windows installation and website updates.

Member 2001-2004, occasional presenter.

Website updates and training.