Sterling Rose Design Blog

RailsConf was inspiring on so many levels, it would be almost impossible to try to cram it all into one blog entry, so I won’t even try. So for this entry, I want to talk about what I took away from the event in terms of being a female developer in an industry that is overwhelmingly male in its constituency.

Before about three weeks ago, I didn’t really think about it much. I was a “coder who was female”, not a “female coder.” The “girl” part was at best incidental. I mean, sure, I knew that I was in the minority in the #rubyonrails IRC channel, but it was a non-issue for the most part. Now, I’m more conscious.

There were about 40 female and about 1100 male attendees at RailsConf 09. That’s a ratio of about 3.6%. I saw and heard (via the #railsconf IRC channel) plenty of guys call it a “sausage-fest.” And it was. Now I’m not abou...

Yesterday, I tried an experiment in time management. I am always working on at least a dozen projects (professional and personal) at a time, and was feeling as though a) I wasn’t getting enough done, b) I was distracted even while working by all of the things I hadn’t finished yet, and c) time just kept getting away from me. So I decided to try a little timeboxing, in conjunction with #dailygoals.

The basic concept was this: Via the #dailgoals Twitter hashtag, I define what projects I want to work on that day. I stayed away from saying I wanted to complete anything but the most insular of tasks (placing an order, for example) and left everything else open-ended. Then, I whipped out my handy-dandy timer application, Apimac timer (I’m sure a kitchen egg timer would work just as ...