The Rails community has had its share of misogynistic controversy over the last several years. Dominated by male programmers (recent statistics suggest 94% of employed Rails programmers are male), the inroads to professional Rails development for females are not exactly accessible or welcoming.

Of course, it's not just the Rails community that lacks representation from women. When only 18% of the Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients in 2010 were female () it's obvious there is a lack of female participation in the entire field of programming.

This past weekend I participated in Hack the Midwest, a Kansas City hackathon. The event was a huge success drawing a crowd of around 100 developers. As one of the visiting developer evangelists said, it was a great turnout for a New York hackathon, much less one in the midwest.

At the competition I built Qup.tv, a simple service that will send you email alerts when Netflix adds new titles to its streaming catalog. I was lucky enough to win top honors at the event, but this wasn't my first rodeo. With three Rails Rumbles, two Node Knockouts, and a Startup Weekend under my belt I'm beginning to get a sense of what works and what doesn't. So here's my list of things to keep in mind when competing in a hackathon:

Metro areas generally have really active user groups where Rails_Awesome_Lord presents regularly, famous hackers drop in to give presentations, and the Rails Elite throw smashing parties and drinkups after each meeting. But not all developers live in (or near) metro areas and can partake in such festivities. If you're among the rural band of outlaw programmers, this post is for you.

As someone who has both attended and instructed many 2-5 days classes on programming topics, I’ve come to understand there are certain things teachers can do to make classes more useful and enjoyable.

Here are 12 tips to keep in mind when creating and teaching a technical course:

Our developers tend to have interesting conversations throughout the day in Socialspring Stream, our communication and collaboration application. It occurred to me today that it would make sense to take some of the useful tidbits of information that surface there and share them with the rest of the development community! After all, the conversations are captured already - all I need to do is bundle up the relevant bits of information and serve them to you via our blog; in other words, expect more quick posts of tips and tricks here!

Last week, I packed my bags and headed for Norfolk, VA to speak at the Mid-Atlantic Developers Expo. I've spent the better part of the past year traveling the country, speaking about Geospatial Programming using Ruby and Rails. As a long-time lover of maps, the topic has been a joy to introduce to the community of Ruby developers, at both small regional conferences like MagicRuby or MountainRuby, and at major national conferences like RubyConf 2010 and RailsConf 2011.

Thought Leader – Strategic Solutionary – Creative Ideation – Digital Marketing Strategy – Emerging Media Strategy – Integrated Demand Generation

If you’re a programmer these words might make you feel unwell. To an outsider it seems like the Marketing crowd dresses themselves with esoteric buzzwords in order to mystify and confuse the rest of us. But to be fair, most (real) marketing professionals are creative and brilliant problem-solvers and avant-garde engineers within their own culture — just like most programmers. It’s best not to mark and avoid the otherworldy marketers, though it might be tempting. Whether or not we understand their language and their seemingly mystical approach — we need them.