By Sarah | August 31, 2010
I’m excited to speak tomorrow at the Bootstrapper’s Breakfast, a monthly event held in SF and other bay area cities. There’s a lot of talk about fund-raising and venture-backed business these days, but there are also a lot of people just making their businesses happen with a series of small steps. I’ll give a very [...]
By Sarah | August 24, 2010
Last night, Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) and I attended a Tokyo Ruby Meetup, asakusa.rb. It was the 63rd (ish) meeting of this group of Rubyists that meets every Tuesday. There are about 10 ruby core committers who attend this group, along with other developers who gather weekly to hack Ruby code. This special meeting had an [...]
I attended the Lucene/Solr meetup this week — quite a swank event sponsored by Salesforce with tasty appetizers, beers and an incredible view of the bay. The three speakers were very knowledgeable and well spoken and I enjoyed hearing about the different applications of Lucene and Solr. Below are my rough notes. For [...]
In April, I spoke at the East Bay Ruby Meetup about Test-First Teaching both as a teaching methodology and as a path to learning about test-driven development.
Marakana kindly sponsored the recording of the talk. Max Walker did the video recording, production and and just posted it:
Another Ruby on Rails training at Marakana is coming [...]
I just got back from Google-sponsored hack session at RailsConf. Google App Engine and JRuby combine to create some real awesomeness. I created an small app that uses some classes from Lucene (written in Java) with a Rails app (written in Ruby) to search text stored in the App Engine data store. [...]
The Garibaldi Project has created a way for scholars to interact with a work of art that is too fragile and too large for routine study. Yesterday, I sat in on a forum presentation of this Brown University project. The project is a collaboration with Microsoft Research and the British Library, using a Microsoft Surface [...]
John Woodell (@johnwoodell) gave an excellent talk at the App Engine Meetup this evening on using Ruby on Google’s AppEngine. After some highlights of App Engine and a tour of three real-world use cases, John gave a series of quick demos of what seem to be very well-documented resources for getting started. I built [...]
Alexander B. Howard wrote an excellent article about why to include women. In response to a reader, he added a comment which I find particularly insightful and compelling. He quotes a column by David Brooks last year on genius:
If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you’d take a girl [...]
By Sarah | April 25, 2010
I cornered Eric Ries after Startup Lessons Learned Conference yesterday. Many things he said in the course of the day resonated with me, but only one was never elaborated upon and I felt driven to ask a follow-up question.
Eric said that this was a “minimally viable conference.” They set a date and the [...]
By Sarah | April 24, 2010
Kent Beck had a great anecdote in his Startup Lessons Learned talk yesterday which proved to be an apt metaphor for the role of a startup company. Kent keeps goats where he lives in Oregon and he talked about how he would go out to his backyard and approach one of the goats. He [...]