Author Archives: Sarah

lean startup keynote

Brief notes on Eric Ries’ keynote at Startup Lessons Learned Conference.  If I can keep up I will live blog the conference.  Eric says: “I do not want your undivided attention.”  So here goes.  Twitter hashtag is #sllconf and the event is being live streamed.
Whenever you accomplish something, you don’t get a gold star, or [...]

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lean startup methodology

I enjoyed watching this video interview of Eric Ries talking about “lean startup methodology.” It sounds a lot like agile development to me.
“a failure of an idea doesn’t mean the failure of the company”
I’m honored to receive am IMVU scholarship to Friday’s Startup Lessons Learned Conference. I am excited to spend [...]

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strong statements about testing

I enjoyed “strong statements” in Shannon Behrens’ SF Ruby talk tonight. I didn’t agree with all of them, but not vehemently so. I do strongly agree with the following.

Not all tests have the same value
Some tests don’t provide enough value to justify their existence

perhaps they take too long to write
perhaps they are [...]

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test first teaching, path to TDD

Over the past year I’ve taught about a dozen sessions of Ruby language or Ruby on Rails programming classes. I’ve been using a combination of presentation, live coding demonstration, follow along with irb (Ruby’s interactive scripting environment) and test-first teaching exercises. I’ve reflected on what works well and experimented with curriculum and teaching [...]

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great ideas from awesome women

It was amazing to have lunch today with Angie Chang of Women 2.0 and Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners and Jen-Mei Wu who is currently working with me at Blazing Cloud.

Since I’ve been working with Jen-Mei, she has spent most of her time at Honk and it was a treat to spend some time talking [...]

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one year of sf ruby

One year ago today, I wrote about attending my first SF Ruby meetup, where I met Sarah Mei, the only other woman in attendance. I wrote then that I hoped someday “to attend a meetup where I don’t personally double the number of women.”
I am pleased that my hope has come to [...]

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recognizing leadership on ada lovelace day

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I’ve chosen to highlight Amy Chen and Melanie Archer. These two amazing women have agreed to lead the next SFRuby Outreach Workshop for Women. They are each strong developers, but I also want to acknowledge their ability and willingness to take on a leadership role.
Melanie Archer attended [...]

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the truth about mobile development

For my talk at LA RubyConf, I decided to share some truths about mobile development, in general, rather than focusing only on how it is different with Ruby using the Rhomobile platform.
The truth is that mobile development sucks. With Ruby, sometimes it sucks less. The unavoidable problem is that at the end of [...]

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agile development in action

I don’t know who first said that if you aren’t embarrassed about your v1 product, you waited too long to ship. At Mightyverse, we repeated that to ourselves as we struggled to release the first version of our iPhone app. After 2 weeks, we hit 128 downloads and I enjoyed reading my co-founder, [...]

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rails security review checklist

I’m reviewing the security of a web app built with Ruby on Rails, so I put together a checklist for a security audit. This isn’t a bank or high security situation, but there were a number of engineers and quite a bit of open source code, so I thought a few checks were in [...]

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