Thursday, August 27, 2015

I want to mentor you on an open source Rails project

Update: there's an orientation session on 9/13/15 if you're interested in helping

I built a small, fun Rails app called ignitespeak to manage speakers and proposals for Ignite Baltimore. I've long thought that it would be a great project for beginners to work on, because it's well-tested, it gets regular use, and it's open source.

I have an ambition to make the app more useful and available to all Ignite organizations around the world. If you're looking for a way to break into Rails development, and would like to get my personal attention, advice, or mentoring on your commits and pull requests, please contribute!  I created a number of Github issues for some possible projects.

If you're really serious about gaining more Ruby/Rails skills, I'd even be willing to do some pair programming with you, either remotely or at an open source hack night.

Monday, August 10, 2015

Stepping down from Ignite Baltimore leadership

I have a post up on Technical.ly Baltimore, Why I'm stepping down from Ignite Baltimore:
For the past several years, Neal Shaffer, Jen Meyer and I have had the privilege of helping to organize Ignite Baltimore, where 16 (or so) speakers each get five minutes to present an idea with slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. 
It has been an extremely rewarding experience. Through Ignite we’ve met some of the most thoughtful, passionate and creative people around town. We even got to fly in one of the founders of Ignite, Brady Forrest (whose talk appears in the list below). Though I have been most publicly associated with Ignite, in reality it has been a group effort from the start: Patti Chan and I originally started working on Ignite back in 2008. Eventually the team grew to include awesome friends like Neal and Jen, and also Heather Sarkissian, Christian Malone, Lindsey Davis and Melissa Macchiavelli. 
But now it’s time for new leadership and new ideas. Jen, Neal and I are stepping down from the Ignite Baltimore team.
Check out the full post for more details, including a list of some of my favorite Ignite videos!