[Ruby] memcached-like Ruby+Erlang implementation

[shane becker]

> I wasn't at RailsConf so I have no idea what you're talking about  
> (I probably don't want to know).  I'm surprised that the gender  
> balance was good, I heard it was the usual single digit percentage  
> of women.

i certainly didn't mean that it was _good_, just that it was better  
than all confs i've been too except sxsw.

> But then my view is skewed because I can't go to a technology  
> related event without altering the gender balance by 20-infinity%.

i know one of the women in devchix said that this was better than  
rubyconf. at least at this one she didn't have time to meet them all.  
again far from great, but at least a little better. another thing  
that was said by the devchix women was that anytime they're talking  
with men about this kind of thing they ask them to imagine it  
reversed. what if you [the man they're speaking to] were at a table  
with 12 women and no men? what if someone made a website posting  
pictures of as a minority participant in some larger group? what if  
you had to constantly prove your mettle, your technical ability, your  
general nerdiness? and so on. their discussion was really great.

> I'm glad that there's enthusiasm for improving the gender balance  
> here and in tech in general.  If you want to get women's point of  
> view on that, this document is a good start:

> http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/howto.html

thanks. i'll give it a read.

> One bit of feedback from me -- women may be a bit skeptical of a  
> group of unfamiliar men asking them to do something because they  
> want to meet women.

i appreciate what you're saying. just to be clear, though, i don't  
care about this to meet women. i care about this because it would be  
better for everyone involved in the ruby/rails community (both  
collectively and individually) if there was a greater diversity of  
minds making up said community. all this is true, of course, about  
different races or sexual orientation or genders (this whole  
discussion has been pretty gender-binary; gender is more of a  
spectrum than a switch...). you know, what would our world look like  
if there were boat loads of rubyists kids who hadn't even started  
high school yet? i don't know, but i can't imagine that it would be a  
bad thing.

> If you haven't already, you might want to start off by talking with  
> your female friends/co-workers to see if there's interest on that end.

geoff and i talked about this offline a bit.

> geoff:  the first thing to do is to consult with the women  
> themselves before taking any action. They already have plans and  
> understand what's going on and how to enable women in the computer  
> industry.

sure, sure. makes sense. i had that in mind, but didn't explain it  
fully. basically, i think that we should try to find seattle women  
rubyists to see if they'd be up for teach a class. failing that, find  
seattle women programmers looking to make the switch to ruby and give  
them special attention, so that they could teach the class. failing  
both of those, we teach women ruby/rails then after a few sessions  
hopefully we'll find some women to take it over.

i certainly agree that having women on the other side, the teaching  
side, would really make it work better. but i was talking to emily  
(my gf) about this and she said that even if it was men teaching it,  
it would be ok --if it was the right men. she's met evan. she said  
she wouldn't be intimidated by him at all. i think the same is true  
of you. and ryan when he's in his 'help out the newb' mode, he's  
really good. aaron would be good too. i think some of the others that  
come on tuesday are either not very good at welcoming new people,  
especially women or are just socially awkward / inept and are bad  
with people in general.


and yet again i'll cite Propagandhi who often say it better than i  
could:
"and yes, i recognize the irony that the very system i oppose affords  
me the luxury of biting the hand that feeds. but that's exactly why  
privileged fucks like me should feel obliged to whine and kick and  
scream- until everyone has everything they need."