Had an epic day yesterday in London.

I was the guest speaker at IT’s not just for the boys. This is an event organised by Target Events and was sponsored by Thoughtworks, Logica, M&G and Bloomberg. Female university students were invited to apply to attend the event. Successful applicants were interviewed and invited to attend. An afternoon at the gorgeous Bloomberg offices with a previous event attendee sharing what she’d learned, myself as a senior female in the industry sharing my life story and a bit of advice I wanted to pass on, followed by skills workshops with each of the sponsors. This was followed by a Q&A with inspiring and successful ladies from each of the sponsoring companies. Each of them impressed me!

During the drinks after it was wonderful being approached by girls to tell me how I’d inspired them to get up, make things happen, go to events and believe in themselves.

One thing I shared with them is that, as women, we’re pretty bad at blowing our own trumpets. So I’m blowing mine now. I was flipping fantastic and I’m looking forward to really helping all the girls who took my contact details.

Girl Geek Warrior Princess Points +100

Huge thanks to Katie Partridge from Thoughtworks for inviting me along and to Late Rooms, my wonderful employers for supporting me in this. ( : Here’s my presentation if you are interested:

http://prezi.com/sfchstkgb4mq/its-not-just-for-the-boys/

My mummy’s incredibly easy chocolate cake recipe. Dead easy, delicious and works every time!

Ingredients

6oz SR flour

6oz Caster sugar

6oz butter/marg

3 large eggs

1 tea spoon baking powder

2 table spoons cocoa powder

Method

Mix all together until pale and fluffy. Bake at 180 degrees C until risen and springy to the touch. Decorate by smoothing over Nutella (or any chocolate spread) and decorate with chocolate mini eggs or crumbled Cadbury’s Flake. If you really want to be fancy put some high fruit content raspberry jam in the middle (sandwich variety, won’t work as well with cupcakes)

Late on last year, after a very successful Barcamp Blackpool and Magrails, I approached @seanhandley (one of the Magrails organisers) who I’d met at LeedsHack earlier in the year to co-organsise a Hack Day in Manchester. He thought it was an awesome idea and jumped on board.

My cousin runs the Park Inn next to the LateRooms offices and he’d met up with me a few times for lunch when I first moved. He loved the idea of 100 or so geeks turning up for a weekend! Plans were afoot!

Even better the fabulous @jonatkinson of @testled said he would provide us with a site designed by @prettierpixels! It’s more gorgeous than we ever thought it could be, and made the whole event feel that bit more… well professional.

We spoke to the unis, as I wanted to try and get the students in. They conferred that March was a good time for the students as they would be less busy and more likely to attend. As we didn’t have all that much time we started talking to potential sponsors…

Sean and I went to visit the Melbourne Hosting offices (as they’d been great supporters of Magrails, also I wanted to move in). We met with Chris Marsh, who loved the idea! Chris suggested loads of other organisations we could get involved in the day, including the Manchester Science Festival. I could have kicked myself. The MSF get the Manchester Girl Geeks involved in the festival every year. I remember setting up the first one a few years ago. I immediately got in touch with Natalie and arranged a meeting. Chris also suggested a few other bodies to include in the event and I’m really looking forward to seeing him again to see what other directions we can take the hack day.

In the interim Sean and I met with Tom Morris (a developer) and Ian Forrester (whose reputation precedes him) from the BBC. They also loved the idea, however Ian was concerned that an event of 100 or so people would be too small for sponsors to be interested. I argued that increasing the numbers would also mean increasing the number of projects at the end. After 24 hours straight of intense coding and very little or no sleep, sitting through 30 presentations of just 30s each at Leeds Hack, I found, actually quite strenuous. This is where Tom interjected and came up with an awesome idea… Why not do it x-factor stylee, with a much anticipated final! This idea definitely has legs. It means we can invite other people along to watch the presentations of the hacks and turn it into an enormous awards ceremony. In my head I’ve got visions of the Schofe and Holly Willoughby presenting and it being the new saturday night sensation!

More meetings followed, each one more exciting than the last. We met with the Manchester Science Festival organisers who loved the idea of the the event so much that they want it to be part of the festival, and for it to be held at the Museum of Science and Industry! We’re still liasing with Natalie abot dates, costs and the finer details, but we have the conference centre for the entire weekend!

This is just update number one!

Last saturday saw the very first TEDx in Salford, and my brain is still buzzing.

The speakers were all* excellent and varied. We had an atronaut, explorers, a biologist, physicists, musicians, even a futurologist!

The full bios of the speakers can be found here

http://www.tedxsalford.com/event/speakers

In all it was well worth the £65 ticket price, although I do hope that the organisers (all Salford Uni students!) do gather feedback for the event as there were quite of number of things which could easily be done better next year. I may sound harsh here, however as an event organiser myself I know I’d like the chance to improve things and I also know how easy these things would be to fix.

The highlights of the day for me:

• The company; my good friend @seanhandley along with 3 colleagues from Late Rooms, including @hashpointfive (fellow salford uni comp sci 2005 

* barr two rather cringeworthy specimens

It’s a frikkin nightmare. Here’s how I did it:

c:\> gem install rails

this failed with an error message which said “‘make ‘ is not recognized as an internal or external command” whilst trying to build the native extensions.

The native extensions are things that Ruby needs to compile on your native system. It does this using make, the original tool on which rake, nant, powershell and other build tools are based on.

So I went off and downloaded make

(don’t forget to add the make bin directory to your path)

Next issue, make had an error “libintl3.dll could not be found”. Balls. Turns out make has some dependencies you also need to download… It’s a little further down the list after binaries and source.

Next error:

"make: *** No rule to make target `/C/Ruby192/include/ruby-1.9.1/ruby.h'"

Balls. Balls. Balls.

Fix for this is to download the Ruby DevKit. Extract is and run the devkitvars.bat in the root of devkit, this adds loads of really useful stuff to your %PATH%.

Now try it again for the final time:

C:\RubyDevKit>gem install rails
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Fetching: rdoc-3.12.gem (100%)
Depending on your version of ruby, you may need to install ruby rdoc/ri data:

<= 1.8.6 : unsupported
= 1.8.7 : gem install rdoc-data; rdoc-data --install
= 1.9.1 : gem install rdoc-data; rdoc-data --install
>= 1.9.2 : nothing to do! Yay!
Fetching: railties-3.2.0.gem (100%)
Fetching: rails-3.2.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed json-1.6.5
Successfully installed rdoc-3.12
Successfully installed railties-3.2.0
Successfully installed rails-3.2.0
4 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for json-1.6.5...
Installing ri documentation for rdoc-3.12...
Installing ri documentation for railties-3.2.0...
Installing ri documentation for rails-3.2.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for json-1.6.5...
Installing RDoc documentation for rdoc-3.12...
Installing RDoc documentation for railties-3.2.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for rails-3.2.0...

and there was much rejoicing. YAAAY!

Now try to build a rails app:
c:\> rails new project_bob

BALLS!!!!

C:/Ruby192/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/bundler-1.0.5/lib/bundler/ui.rb:56:in `': uninitialized constant Gem::SilentUI (NameError)

JUST FRIKKIN WORK DAMN YOU

after a bit of googling, turns out my bundler was out of date. So….

C:\>gem update bundler

Let’s try making that new Rails app again. Fingers, toes, knees, eyes… all crossed.

IT WORKED!

Now cd into the app you just created and try
c:\project_bob> rails c
Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.0)
irb(main):001:0>

GET IN. All done. Now time to do some work. Hope this helps some other unfortunate soul.

Retro actions

• Have a source control and CI environment (Jeremy to setup) to see benefit of having a test suite – possibly need a bigger code base)
• Randori for first half and pairing for second half worked well
• Show and tell at the end
• No one is wrong (except Tim)
• Use RSPEC next time
• Disussions on techniques and styles are fine to happen, but driver (one at the keyboard) has final say
• Introductions as you stand up at the radori
• Carry on with Ruby
• Repeat the checkout kata

Future focuses

• TDD from hell
• BDD
• TDD as if you meant it
• Refactoring
• Refucktorting
• Start with a skeleton and build up tests as you go

Homework

_why’s poignant guide to Ruby
Ruby Koans – Geeky Crossword
Hackety hack

I’ve been at Laterooms for a couple of months now and it’s certainly a challenge, and one I’m really enjoying. It’s a bigger team than any of my last jobs, which means I’m getting the opportunity to work in loads of different areas with a bunch of different people. My voice is heard, I’m involved in loads of initiatives (you’ll see one below) and the people here are awesome, both technically and socially.

We’re currently recruiting at http://LateRooms.com, and put together this pretty cool video to show you what we do:

For me the other selling points are:

• We have Kevin Rutherford in once a week, delivering coaching and training
• We do loads of in house training in the form of workshops and katas at least once a week
• I work with great people. They’re talented, passionate, driven and heavily involved in the local tech community.
• Pub outings in the evening
• Curry friday
• Working closely with everyone involved in a feature. From idea to done.
• Panoramic views of Manchester
• Supportive, friendly atmosphere with proper northern banter
• TDD, C#, Ruby, BDD and all that fun agile jazz!

So if you do fancy joining us, email me:

gemma dot cameron at laterooms dot com

Here I am at the work Cirque de Noel, being spun right round.

Laterooms Christmas Party – @ruby_gem from hashpointfive on Vimeo.