RubyNation: Closing Keynote: Dr. Nic Williams
RailsInstaller. Why was it built? When Rails 3 came out the documentation told Windows users to install InstantRails. But…. InstantRails installed ruby 1.8.6….. yet Rails 3 only works with ruby 1.8.7 or ruby 1.9.2. WTF?! Why didn’t anyone catch this?
“I wasn’t wrong; it just wasn’t the best example.”
“A healthy community involves someone that has more expertise turning around and pulling someone else forward.”
“Why do we care? We love ruby. We’re happy. We don’t like to think about suffering in the world. But we should reflect on that a bit. There are a lot of people in the world that are suffering. Think about it, right now, somewhere in the world, there’s someone that’s coding in Java. Well, to be honest, they’re either defining a variable or writing a comment, but they’re out there.” [There’s a bit of paraphrasing here, because Nic talks faster than I type, but that should be pretty close.]
Users into Core Contributors
A healthy community is huge, diverse, growing community.
The ruby and rails community, at the moment, is not doing a very good job with diversity, whether it’s gender, race or platform diversity.
Create your own club that talks about the thing that you are interested in.
“Wouldn’t you like to know how they did it? Well, yes you would, because I’ve got the microphone, and I’m going to tell you anyway.”
How to create a club? - Do this from the ground up
“RailsInstaller has to work 100% of the time.”
“Our tools have to be rock-solid. New users don’t create tickets, because they don’t know what’s broken. If they tell you that it didn’t work, then it’s your responsibility to pass that information along.”
Use Toastmasters as a model, because they’ve had clubs for a long time, and those clubs have been growing and growing.
officer roles - you don’t have to create the club, and do everything as well
meetings with a purpose - you can’t have the same role year after year - make sure that there are at least two other people that want to your job
growth, renewal - seeing new people come to your community should make you feel really good
roles (from Toastmasters)
president - responsible for everything else :)
vp education - manages the education program of all of the members - keeps track of the educational status of every member of the club
vp marketing - in charge of getting new people into the club
sergeant at arms - in charge of setting up tables, handing out name tags, sign-ups and other logistical tasks
can you guarantee it is always good? - new people should be able to depend on a consistent experience
new member experience - this should be a focus - someone should reach out to people that have shown interest in the attending the meeting
officer elections - have a way to change who is in charge
Command-F1 switches the mirror of monitors on and off
identify officer roles - find out who wants to help, and what they are willing to do
opt-in to roles - now that people have roles, they will start solving problems like a leader
“RailsInstaller is only useful if you share it with people.”
watch a new person discover rails
“[Smacks head] And there was no reason for me to hit myself. And I regret doing it now, because I feel rather ridiculous now.”
“Ruby and rails on OS/X is not as easy you might think it is - you should not have to pull out your XCode cd just to install an XML gem - perhaps we should start including pre-compiled binaries in our gems.” [paraphrasing again]
theartofmadeline
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