107: The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship Program

Greater Than Code

• Episode: 107: The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship Program
• Website: Greater Than Code
• Feed URL: https://www.greaterthancode.com/feed/podcast
• Duration: 00:42:27
• Published: 2018-11-28 06:00

This episode was recorded live at RubyConf in Los Angeles. We talked to special guests, Jennifer Tran, Christine Seeman, and Jeremy Schuurmans about the Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship Program. Check out this new podcast called The Local Maximum - it's hosted by Max Sklar who is a Machine Learning Engineer at Foursquare. He covers a lot of fascinating topics: AI, building better products, and the latest technology news from his unique perspective. Max interviews a wide diversity of guests, including Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Creators of all types. You can see their bios at localmaxradio.com, and subscribe to the Local Maximum podcast wherever you listen! Panelists: Jamey Hampton | John K. Sawers | Sam Livingston-Gray Special Guests: Jennifer Tran: @jenniferstudies | GitHub | Acorns Jeremy Schuurmans: @JMSchuurmans | Flatiron School Christine Seeman: @tech_christine | christine-seeman.com | Flywheel Show Notes: The Ruby Central Opportunity Scholarship/Guide Program 02:13 – Superpowers: Flying, Changing Diapers, and Empathy! 03:21 – Scholars’ Favorite Parts of the Conference 06:58 – Conferencing as an Introvert: Having Conference Buddies! 08:06 – Meeting New People 10:15 – Challenges of Conferencing 11:55 – Navigating Conference Parties and the General Hubbub 17:35 – Overcoming Pressure 21:09 – Lightning Talks 26:31 – Live Mob Programming Event 30:07 – Advice For Future Scholars 34:50 – Coming to Tech From Different Backgrounds and All Walks of Life Want to help keep us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag, and bring us to conferences near you? Support us via Patreon! Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to [email protected]. Are you Greater Than Code? Submit guest blog posts to [email protected] Please leave us a review on iTunes! This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode. To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Transcript: JAMEY:  Hi, everyone and welcome to Greater Than Code. This is a very exciting episode. We're all here in person, which is not normally how we record, at RubyConf in LA, so it's very exciting. I'm Jamey Hampton and I'm here with John K Sawers. JOHN:  Thank you, Jamey and I'm here with Jennifer Tran. JENNIFER:  Thank you. I'm Jennifer Tran and I'm a junior software engineer at Acorns and I would like to introduce Jeremy. JEREMY:  Hi, I'm Jeremy Schuurmans. I'm from Portland, Oregon and I'm a student at Flatiron School and I'd like to introduce Christine. CHRISTINE:  Hi, I'm Christine Seeman. I am from Omaha, Nebraska and I work at Flywheel. We do WordPress hosting for creatives and I would like to introduce to you, to Sam. SAM:  Hi, I'm Sam Livingston-Gray and I'd like you thought you could get away from but no. As mentioned, this is a very special episode. We are at RubyConf and we thought it would be fun to talk to some participants in Ruby Central's Opportunity Scholarship Program and what's that you asked? ALL:  What's that, Sam? What's that? SAM:  This is a program that was introduced, I think at RailsConf in 2013 and the idea is that as part of efforts to bring new people into the Ruby community who are otherwise, underrepresented or under-indexed in tech, the program involves finding people and giving them a free ticket and for some conferences, sponsors can be found to help with travel expenses as well, which is really cool. Participants get admission to the conference and they also get paired up with a guide who is, at least a slightly more experienced member of ...