WNB.rb August 2021 Meetup

Join us for our monthly WNB.rb meetup, featuring two talks:

How to get started with contributing to Ruby on Rails by Stefanni Brasil

If you ever get to the rails repository hoping to contribute to the project, you see that there are +384 open issues. Which one should you pick? How do people even get started? Even worse: they all seem pretty hard.

If this daunting feeling is familiar to you, welcome to the club, my friend because I know how does that feel like. By the end of this talk, you’ll learn a few ways you can contribute to Rails today (if you want).

Stefanni Brasil is the co-creator of hexdevs, where she builds programs that train developers for excellence. She is a self-taught developer, community strategist, avid reader, and cats lover. She writes on her blog, hosts live Open Source Thursdays coding sessions and co-hosts the hexdevs podcast. Besides that, she's been giving lightning talks at local meetups, on RubyConf Sao Paulo, and RailsConf. She is a huge believer that everyone is capable of achieving whatever they want for their lives.

Intro to Ruby Memoization by Jemma Issroff

A few years ago, I was tracking down a gnarly performance spike. Overnight, a job that usually took minutes had spiked to take almost a full hour. The culprit? A misuse of ||= in an attempt to memoize a value.

What is memoization? When is it useful? When can we not use memoization? How can we memoize effectively in Ruby? We'll discuss all of these questions and more in this talk.

Most relevant to this talk, Jemma Issroff is a maintainer of MemoWise, benchmarked as the fastest memoization gem. She is also one of the founders and organizers of WNB.rb. An avid Ruby blogger and speaker, she writes the "Tip of the Week" for Ruby weekly, is currently writing a mini-book on Ruby garbage collection and is a regular co-host on The Ruby on Rails Podcast.

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.