WNB.rb July 2021 Meetup

Join us for the fireside chats edition of WNB.rb where we'll have a panel discussion about giving technical talks.

This special Fireside Chats edition of our monthly event will feature a speaker panel who will discuss giving technical talks. This experienced panel will answer questions around deciding on topics, writing CFPs, preparing their slides, rehearsing and delivering their talks.

We are thrilled to introduce our panelists:

Kerstin Puschke (she/her) is a developer transforming Shopify’s massive Rails code base into a more modular monolith, building on her prior experience with distributed microservices architectures. She used to run the Hamburg Ruby user group and her local Rails Girls chapter. While she loves visiting warm and sunny cities, the Canadian winter has revived her passion for skiing.

Sylvia Fronczak (she/her) just recently joined Shopify as a senior developer. Though she’s been in software for about two decades now, she is a newby at Ruby! She loves helping others advance their careers and software development knowledge. While not at work, Sylvia loves spending time either outdoors or taking way too many pictures of her cats.

Gabi Stefanini (she/her) is a software developer at Shopify who has worked on the core checkout system of the platform, bringing SSL encryption to thousands of merchants and, more recently, helped in the upgrade of Shopify’s codebase to Rails 5. Currently, she works on shipping new internal tools to increase every team’s productivity. Gabi aims to demystify coding to beginners via mentoring and teaching programming as well as encouraging others to contribute to open source projects.

We'll send out a zoom link and a form to presubmit any questions a few days before the meetup to everyone who has registered. What is WNB.rb?

WNB.rb’s goal is to support a more diverse group of people to make significant and meaningful contributions to the Ruby world. It is a monthly meetup with technical talks where the speakers and audience members are all women and non-binary people. We hope to provide a brave space for tenured speakers, first-time speakers and everyone in between to interact in a technical capacity. This community seeks to enable developers to grow their technical skill sets and confidence, further promoting inclusion of women and non-binary folks within the Ruby community.

What happens during each meetup?

On the last Tuesday of every month at 12pm EDT, we host two speakers to give technical talks on Ruby and the related ecosystem. The talks are be 15 minutes each, with 5 minutes Q&A afterwards. Towards the end of the meetups, we have a few minutes where folks can optionally stay online to chat. The meetups last one hour, and we post recordings of each talk afterwards. This meetup will forever be virtual!

I’m interested in speaking at a future meetup, how can I do that?

We are so glad! Please send an email to jemmaissroff@gmail.com and e.m.giurleo@gmail.com. No need to write anything in depth or fancy. Even if you don’t know what you’d like to talk about or you’re a first time speaker, please reach out and we’ll work with you to put together a talk for a future WNB.rb meetup.

I don’t identify as woman / non-binary but I’d like to be an ally. How can I best do that?

Thanks for asking! We’ll be sure to post links to all talks to our twitter so you’ll still be able to watch, learn from and share all of our talks. Ways you can be an ally are to continue to advocate for more diverse voices at conferences and other meetups, learn from, elevate, support and/or mentor individuals who add diversity to the space, and share information about this group with anyone who might be interested.

Do you have a code of conduct?

Yes we do! You can read our code of conduct here.