ClojureBridge In Practice 2016
•
0 gefällt mir•385 views
ClojureBridge is a nonprofit organization that provides free, inclusive workshops in Clojure to women. Over the past two years, the Clojure community has written a curriculum, developed an organizing guide, and started teaching workshops--but, how have those workshops played out in practice? In this talk, we'll look at what it takes to organize and run a successful ClojureBridge workshop, hearing from those who have done it, themselves!
Empfohlen
Empfohlen
Weitere ähnliche Inhalte
Was ist angesagt?
Was ist angesagt? (16)
Andere mochten auch
Andere mochten auch (13)
Ähnlich wie ClojureBridge In Practice 2016
Ähnlich wie ClojureBridge In Practice 2016 (20)
Kürzlich hochgeladen
Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)
ClojureBridge In Practice 2016
- 2. Who are we? Katherine “kf” Fellows Data Engineer at Simple kf@clojurebridge.org @kf Anna Pawlicka Software Developer at @WalmartLabs anna@clojurebridge.org @AnnaPawlicka
- 3. What is ClojureBridge? ClojureBridge is a non-profit, volunteer- driven effort to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for women. Image credits, clockwise: Yamila Moreno @ ClojureBridge London, Arne Brasseur @ ClojureBridge Berlin, Mei Weng Brough-Smyth @ ClojureBridge Brisbane
- 4. Where did ClojureBridge come from? Adopted the RailsBridge model of programming workshops Member of Bridge Foundry, a nonprofit umbrella that supports programming language-focused diversity organizations. Bridge Foundry
- 5. What does ClojureBridge do? Write Clojure lesson plans for workshops Teach volunteers how to run diversity-focused workshops Organize workshops Teach women how to code in Clojure!
- 6. Curriculum
- 9. Why write a curriculum from scratch?
- 10. Why write a curriculum from scratch? 38 different Clojure books Not self-published Include every edition of each book, since some books had different authors for each edition
- 11. Why write a curriculum from scratch? 37 “he” 1 “she”
- 12. Why write a curriculum from scratch? 232 “he” 9 “she”
- 13. Why write a curriculum from scratch? Input from people who aren’t men!
- 14. How can I contribute to the ClojureBridge curriculum? Choose a module! Teacher’s Guide Set Up Guide Core Curriculum Capstone Application
- 15. ...so many Capstone Apps! Turtles Walk Snowflakes Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Global Growth Caesar Cipher … your idea/implementation ?
- 16. Who writes the ClojureBridge curriculum?
- 17. Who writes the ClojureBridge curriculum? Howard Abrams David Chelimsky Elango Cheran Daniel Compton Sean Corfield Clinton Dreisbach Sean Duckett Katherine Fellows Julian Gamble Josh Head Bridget Hillyer Rebecca Jackson Amanda Kievet Karianne Mah Eleonore Mayola Alex Miller Buro Mookerji Norman Richards curriculum, tones, welcometoclojurebridge, drawing, getting-started, global-growth
- 18. Curriculum Contributor: Elango Cheran Wrote google/clojure-turtle, a Clojure library that implements the Logo programming language in a Clojure context, using Quil for rendering. Used by workshops that use turtles exercises for their capstone project.
- 19. Curriculum Contributor: Elango Cheran Helped teach the San Francisco’s first ClojureBridge workshop in 2014. My main intention in getting involved was to pitch in to the effort. I wanted do my part to help ClojureBridge -- a beginners Clojure workshop that has great (Clojure) community support -- to be able get off the ground and be successful in the early stages. Of course, I totally agree with the overall goal of increasing diversity in the Clojure community. “
- 20. Curriculum Contributor: Elango Cheran Found a good means of writing Clojure in other natural languages (e.g. echeran/clj-thamil). Saw in Yoko’s Clojure/West 2015 talk that teaching functions was generally the most difficult part of ClojureBridge. Chatted with me (kf!) on BART one evening and realized that a Logo implementation could help ClojureBridge. Heard that Bridget really liked the Quil capstone, so decided to use Quil for rendering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqjMZNwnYCY https://youtu.be/fiIJuthOhnk
- 21. Curriculum Contributor: Elango Cheran https://twitter.com/cheshire137/status/645247055674404864
- 22. If you’re interested in writing lesson plans, let us know!
- 24. TODO - Find a location - Find sponsors - Find caterer - Find volunteers - Find participants - Marketing stuff (website, Twitter, Eventbrite) - … lots of other things
- 25. What help is available for first-time organizers? Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/clojurebridge-workshops Mentorship Sponsorship assistance TA training
- 26. Mentorship: Who organizes the organizers? Yoko Harada @yokolet David Chambers @davidchambers kf @kf Malwine Gier @malweene Bhaskar Mookerji @_mookerji Anna Pawlicka @AnnaPawlicka
- 27. Organizing Guide https://github.com/ClojureBridge/organizing Minimum Viable Workshop - what makes a workshop a ClojureBridge workshop Workshop Planning Timeline Money Things Templates and materials Class Level Grouping Guide
- 28. Sponsorship Assistance If you’re unfamiliar with fundraising or don’t feel like you know a lot of tech companies in your town, someone from the ClojureBridge board can help introduce you!
- 29. Previous Sponsors 8th Light Ada Developers Academy Adobe Akamai Aviso Babbel Bitcrowd Bitodi Brick Alloy Buyapowa CircleCI Rally Red Pineapple Media RJMetrics Shareablee Simple Solita Soundcloud Sungard Taser Thoughtworks Fy GitHub Gofore Harbinger Partners Heroku innoQ Intent Media Jayway LambdaWerk Leeds Center for the Arts
- 30. Teacher & TA Training A meeting to discuss teaching best practices and challenges Organized at least a week before the actual workshop Great way for all the volunteers to get to know each other We need it to: Help volunteers become more empathetic and better communicators Talk through anticipated problems and possible solutions Material used: http://curriculum.railsbridge.org/workshop/more_teacher_training
- 31. Organizer: Nola Stowe AustinClojure has hack days on a Saturday usually on a monthly basis, we meet for 3 hours. We took one Saturday and went through the curriculum and played with LightTable. We made some improvements and I developed the printable CheatSheet that we printed and passed out at the meeting. We also went through and tried each of the examples and improved the explanations. “
- 33. Can I haz some numbers? ● 8 countries ● 24 cities ● 33 workshops ● ~ 22 attendees per workshop ● Over 720 attendees worldwide Image credit: Google Maps
- 34. Some questions from those organizers: Who should teach the workshop? How much experience should teachers have? Where do TAs come from, even?
- 35. Who should lead the workshop? Ideally, a woman! ...but maybe not?
- 36. How much experience should teachers have?Lots! ....some! ...none!
- 37. TA: Elena Machkasova Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Minnesota, Morris TA’d for ClojureBridge workshops in Minnesota and Boston Gave the talk “Adapting Clojure to an Intro CS Classroom” at Clojure/West 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5erDyDPzgc
- 38. TA: Elena Machkasova There is no goal of teaching specific concepts and no assessment. The goal is to give students a feel for programming, a better understanding of what approaches and skills this activity requires, and hopefully to make them feel that they have, or can acquire, those skills. Also, hopefully to let the students have fun with programming and experience joy of accomplishing a task. The exact details of what those tasks are matter less (and students often surprise me by trying challenges that I didn't even think of). “
- 39. In other words... The goal of a ClojureBridge workshop is to teach new community members the basics and make them feel welcome to come back and learn more!
- 40. TA: Elena Machkasova Using contacts via Clojure/conj helped. Upper level students at all-women schools (Wellesley, Smith) was helpful (they couldn't make it, but might be able to next time). MS and PhD students in projects that use Clojure is also a promising direction. We do hope to get some of our Track 2 students to mentor next time. In the long run, this is probably one of the best strategies “
- 41. TA: Elena Machkasova Seeing people discover that they can do things that seemed so foreign to them is quite amazing.“ I have to admit that I was quite skeptical about the idea of a one-day Clojure workshop for absolute beginners, and now I can see that it is actually working from the purely pedagogical standpoint as well. It is the work of the community that continues to develop the materials, and hopefully our contributions to it are also helpful. “
- 44. Retrospectives & Feedback Surveys ● Take a step back and analyze what went well, what went wrong, and what could be improved. ● Send out feedback surveys ● Share your results with the community Image credit: Chris Ford
- 45. What attendees liked “The patience of the teachers and the atmosphere - feeling that it was ok to make (a lot!) of mistakes!” “It was great to feel successful so quickly. “ “The environment was supportive/friendly and not as intimidating as I expected.” “Lots of instructors and different ways of teaching.” “I liked the format of the workshop where there's teaching involved, as opposed to the ‘everyone work on a tutorial and ask for help from a coach if they need help’."
- 46. What we could improve on “The tools, specifically LightTable, caused significant friction especially for beginners.” “Need more female programmer volunteers!!!!” “We didn't quite manage to finish the tutorial, but when I tried to finish it at home I found the step up from the previous modules to the clojure project too great and I'm not sure I can continue without help.” “It would be cool to have some follow-up or next steps activities. Like, what should I do after today?”
- 47. Stay in touch Reuse the attendee mailing list to: Invite to local meetups and workshops Notify about Clojure conferences: Opportunity Grants (49 recipients in 2015) ClojureBridge free ticket program (23 tickets given out so far) Clojurians on Slack http://clojurians.net/ Reach out, don’t expect “them” to come to “us”
- 48. Organizer: Jelle Akkerman Our Berlin chapter is focusing on retention. We have a weekly learners group for former Clojurebridge students where we make art (quil/overtone), web apps and even compilers(!!). “ Organizer of ClojureBridge Berlin http://clojure-art-group.tumblr.com
- 49. Think about CB alumni when hiring Groups you can reach out to: ● ClojureBridge board members & organizers, mailing list ○ info@clojurebridge.org ● Lambda Ladies ○ lambda-ladies-functional+owners@googlegroups.com ● Women in Tech group(s)
- 50. Thank You
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hi! Welcome to Clojure/West 2016; this is “ClojureBridge in Practice.”
- I’m kf, a data engineer at Simple in Portland, OR. That’s my email address, and I’m also @kf on Twitter! I’m Anna, I’m a software developer at WalmartLabs and I live in San Francisco Bay Area. You can find me on various social media platforms searching by my boring handle that's my first and last name.
- So, what is a ClojureBridge? It’s a community effort to encourage women who are new to software development or new to Clojure to learn Clojure. We provide weekend workshops world-wide. Workshops are free to attend, with a venue, food and anything else that’s needed covered by sponsors. Workshops are organized by the people from the local community, but all materials and the format of the workshop is developed through collaboration of all people around the world who are involved in ClojureBridge.
- ClojureBridge was started in late 2013, with the first workshops in early 2014. Our workshops are based on the RailsBridge model of programming workshops, which involve a Friday-evening installfest party--where attendees set up their dev environment while socializing and eating free food!--followed by a full Saturday of learning Clojure! After ClojureBridge got started, the folks who started RailsBridge and ClojureBridge teamed up to start Bridge Foundry, a nonprofit that assists technical folks who want to bring more women into their programming language communities. Bridge Foundry provides mentors and advisors for people who want to start diversity-focused programming workshops--so, if you have another favorite programming language you’d like to teach to folks, feel free to reach out!
- So what exactly does ClojureBridge do? Just like this cat, we make magic happen. No, not really. We work on curriculum, slowly developing different versions targeting different levels of programming skills. We teach volunteers, TAs and teachers, to run workshops in an inclusive, supportive environment. We organize workshops all around the world. Every ClojureBridge chapter shares their experience with others and we constantly work on improving our organizing instructions, and our curriculums.
- At ClojureBridge, we’ve started our workshops by developing a custom curriculum.
- Like Anna mentioned, we do curriculum development as a community, so you can find the ClojureBridge curriculum on GitHub at github.com/clojurebridge/curriculum!
- There are lots of ways to volunteer your time with ClojureBridge, but the curriculum is a great way to get started if you’re not super-into attending face-to-face events.
- One of the frequent questions folks ask me at conferences is “Why bother writing your own curriculum when there are so many existing learning resources out there for Clojure, already?” Well, it’s true that there are a lot of books out there that folks can learn from, but an important part of ClojureBridge is that we don’t just teach women Clojure; we get the existing community together and teach them how to make existing spaces more inclusive--and the existing resources out there aren’t quite as inclusive as we’d like to strive for!
- So, not to get too deep into the weeds, but as an example, I went out and found 38 different Clojure books on Amazon--as many Clojure books as I could find that weren’t self-published, including authors from each edition. I also included books that had a substantial part of the text dedicated to Clojure; several chapters, for example.
- Then, I went and read the first few pages, and checked to see what pronouns the authors used for themselves in their bios--but only one of those books had an author who went by anything other than “he.” And that wasn’t super encouraging, in terms of finding beginner-level resources for women-oriented workshops!
- And then, still, I thought, “Even if the authors, themselves, are men, they probably ran their book by some non-male programmers before they published it!” So, I went through the acknowledgement sections of all these books, and I Googled each of the technical folks--programmers--that the authors mentioned as reviewers. If they had a bio on their own website, LinkedIn, or similar--something self-written--and that bio had pronouns in it, I added that person to my spreadsheet. ...and the results still weren’t super-encouraging;
- So, I think there’s more than enough justification for writing our own curriculum--if we’re teaching workshops for people who aren’t men, then we should be considering input from people who aren’t men when we’re writing our lesson plans!
- ...but anyway, there are a few different parts to the ClojureBridge curriculum: The Teacher’s Guide, which explains how to use the curriculum to teach a workshop; The Set Up Guide, which directs attendees on how to set up their Clojure dev environment; The Core Curriculum, which teaches attendees the basics of Clojure syntax; and The Capstone Application, which provides attendees with a project to put their skills into practice. Right now, the core curriculum is a beginner-level curriculum, but we’re interested in developing an intermediate-level one, too! So, if that’s your scene, reach out to one of us and get in touch.
- ...and to go even further, we have a handful of different capstone apps! These are different applications organizers can choose from, depending on what their interests and strengths are, including “Turtles Walk,” which uses this Clojure library called clojure-turtle to create draw line-based graphics using a “turtle” like in Logo; “Snowflakes,” which uses Quil to make an animation of snowflakes falling; “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which uses Overtone to make music; “Global Growth,” which is the first Clojure capstone app we made, to build a basic webapp; and “Caesar Cipher,” which is a mini exercise that lets students practice manipulating strings and characters to make a Caesar cipher.
- So, the ClojureBridge curriculum includes a lot of stuff! But, who writes it?
- ...lots of people! These are the folks I could pull out of the contributors’ lists for the repos at the bottom of the page--so, many thanks!
- ...and, here’s an example of one of the folks who’ve contributed to the ClojureBridge curriculum! Elango wrote clojure-turtle, which is the library we use for the “Turtles Walk” capstone I mentioned earlier.
- Elango initially helped teach San Francisco’s first ClojureBridge workshop in 2014 and says he was interested in teaching Clojure because he used to teach Tamil! He eventually heard about ClojureBridge when he was teaching a two-hour Clojure workshop at Oakland Workshop Weekend back in 2013. The San Francisco workshop involved a lot of community members--it was actually how I first got started doing Clojure!--and like me, Elango really wanted to help out.
- Then, Clojure/West 2015 happened! Elango gave a really great presentation at Clojure/West last year on programming Clojure in Tamil! He also saw a talk from Yoko Harada--another ClojureBridge volunteer who’s on the board, helps with the curriculum, recruits sponsors, and does lots of other stuff--where she talked about how teaching functions is often the hardest part of ClojureBridge workshops. So, Elango decided he wanted to help somehow! He was already thinking of writing a version of Logo written in Clojure, and when he and I ran into each other on the subway one evening, he realized that it could probably be used for Clojure workshops! So, he prioritized it as his side project, choosing Quil for rendering, since Bridget Hillyer--who started ClojureBridge!--was really enthusiastic about it at Clojure/West.
- Now, the library he wrote gets used in ClojureBridge workshops! As evidence, here is a tweet from Sarah Vessels, one of the attendees of ClojureBridge Kentucky last September, using clojure-turtle in action.
- So, who watches the watchers? Or, if you’re not a Star Trek fan, who’s making sure everything goes well?
- That’s a sample TODO list for someone who’s organizing ClojureBridge workshop. Looks pretty uninviting doesn’t it? Even if someone has done it before, it’s still useful to have help - and help there is.
- First of all, there’s a Google group for folks who are organizing a workshop. People post there with questions, advice, and with their reports from completed workshops. Then there’s mentorship, sponsorship assistance and TA training.
- Here are the mentors. You can find them on Twitter or the mailing list. Mentors are basically members of ClojureBridge Board who organized workshops themselves and can guide you through the whole process. Even if you organized a workshop before, we encourage you to keep us in the loop anyway. We want to make sure that organizing ClojureBridge is not a painful experience so that you’re going to organize it again. And again. Until your whole town or city is programming in Clojure ;-)
- There’s also an organizing guide available on GitHub. It’s pretty much a collection of notes on how to tackle all the stuff that needs to be done. If someone has some experience in organizing events, then the Minimum Viable Workshop write-up explains what exactly is needed for a workshop to qualify as ClojureBridge workshop. For example teacher training, installfest on Friday and actual workshop on Saturday. Then there’s a workshop planning timeline that tells you what tasks need be done how many weeks or days in advance. The guide also talks about a sample budget and gives you templates of all e-mail communication which is super useful. There’s also section about different grouping levels and how to approach that subject.
- Money things. I don’t think many of us like dealing with money, otherwise we’d be at a banking conference and I would very much hope that is just a bad dream. And I’m pretty sure that just the thought of finding sponsors and arranging payments sounds pretty scary to some. No one wants to exchange money, set up a bank account and then get into trouble with the Tax Man because they did something wrong. The easiest way is to have sponsors pay for things directly. But then you need to know who to reach out to. If you live in an area rich in tech companies, the chances are you have some contacts. But not everyone does. Fortunately we can help with that too. We can introduce you to some companies and give advice on how to go about fundraising.
- This is a list of all previous sponsors. These amazing companies have very often supported more than one event, very often they also provide space for the event and their employees are often volunteers too. Big thank you to every company listed here, nothing we’ve done so far would have been possible without you.
- After you’ve contacted your mentor, and found sponsors, it’s time to set up Teacher and TA training. This event is intended both for TAs and teachers. It’s for folks who’s never been a TA or teacher before or for those who TAed before but not taught and would like to teach in the future, or for anyone who’s feeling a little shaky about the prospect of doing it again. Basically, the aim is to go over some general teaching concepts as well as ClojureBridge core values and how these influence instructional style. The material we use is the same material that Rails Bridge uses. TA training is also a chance to go through all the problems that volunteers are anticipating, or any worries that they might have, to get to know other volunteers and just make sure that everyone is on the same page.
- Here’s one of the examples of how volunteers prepared themselves for the actual event. Nola Stowe organized ClojureBridge in Austin. The local Austin Clojure meetup group dedicated one of their monthly hack days to work through the curriculum and try out the LightTable. This gave them a chance to check if everything worked and to iron out anything that didn’t. It’s really important to dedicate some time to do that and once one group improves the curriculum, everyone else benefits from it.
- Now, you’ve organized a workshop, you inevitably have to teach it!
- We’ve had 33 workshops so far, over the past ~2 years! That’s 24 cities across 8 countries, with around 22 attendees per workshop--which works out to over 720 ClojureBridge attendees worldwide!
- But across all of those workshops, we’ve gotten a lot of the same few questions from new organizers: Who should teach the workshop? How much experience should teachers have? and Where do TAs come from, even?
- So, who should teach the workshop? Ideally a woman, but maybe not, if there’s not a lady Clojure dev around. (Sidenote: This is a gif I tried to find of a cat leading things, which maybe didn’t work out as well as planned.) One of the goals of ClojureBridge is to create spaces led by people who are underrepresented in tech! So, when there are women excited to volunteer, we generally cede whichever public-facing volunteer roles we can to women--so they can be recognized as role models in the space. That being said, a lot of the time, there aren’t that many women volunteers around who feel comfortable teaching a workshop; sometimes, they’d rather TA or organize. In those cases, we’re super-jazzed to have other volunteers step in!
- ClojureBridge teachers come from lots of different backgrounds. Some of them are experienced teachers, others are programmers who don’t really do public speaking at all, and others are relatively new programmers just jazzed to talk about Clojure! Truth be told, we’ve found that as long as you’re familiar with the concepts in the curriculum--and you’ve worked through the exercises a few times, yourself--you’re probably good to teach a ClojureBridge workshop. Minimal experience required!
- Here’s an example of one of our TAs! Elena’s an associate professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota in Morris. She’s TA’d for ClojureBridge workshops in Minnesota and Boston, and she also gave a talk at last year’s Clojure/West on adapting Clojure for an intro-level computer science classroom. Now, rest assured: not all ClojureBridge TAs and teachers are professors of computer science--but when I was talking with Elena about her experiences teaching, I felt like she had some really great responses!
- In particular: some ClojureBridge teachers and TAs previously TA’d for courses in grad school and are super-excited to get back into the classroom for a day! However, there are some differences between teaching for K12 or university and teaching for ClojureBridge. As Elena puts it: There’s no goal of teaching specific concepts and no assessment. The goal is to give students a feel for programming, a better understanding of what approaches and skills this activity requires, and hopefully to make them feel that they have, or can acquire, those skills. Also, hopefully to let the students have fun with programming and experience joy of accomplishing a task. The exact details of what those tasks are matter less (and students often surprise me by trying challenges that I didn’t even think of).
- In other words, the goal of a ClojureBridge workshop isn’t necessarily to set benchmarks and make sure people meet them; ClojureBridge workshops shouldn’t be a rush, and people shouldn’t even necessarily feel like they’ve finished anything. The goal of a ClojureBridge workshop is to teach new community members the basics and make them feel welcome to come back and learn more!
- As part of TAing and organizing for Clojure, Elena also spent some time recruiting other volunteers to help teach the workshop. One of the frequent barriers new organizers face is figuring out where to find TAs who aren’t men. Existing Clojure user groups are generally really friendly and excited to help teach a workshop, but also: existing Clojure user groups are usually predominantly male, and one of the key points of ClojureBridge is to create a learning environment for women. So, it helps to have some women instructors around, as well. Elena’s strategy for this was to reach out to folks you meet at Clojure/West and Clojure/conj! Also, if you happen to have college students or staff in your user group, it also helps a lot to reach out to the computer science department and find upper-level or grad students who are interested in TAing; all-women’s colleges are especially great places. And, once you’ve run your first workshop, invite back previous attendees to serve as TAs! It helps to have TAs who can more easily relate to students, plus it’s the more sustainable route long-term.
- And, finally, Elena’s most valuable takeaway from teaching the workshop was “seeing people discover that they can do things that seem so foreign to them.” It turned out that the attendees learned functional programming concepts like higher-order functions and recursion pretty naturally! And, even though she was skeptical at first about how feasible it would be to teach a one-day, actually beginner-level workshop in Clojure, she found that it worked really well! Now, it’s the community’s job to keep developing materials and contributing their time.
- What happens after the workshop?
- While you’re organizing and later running the workshop, you’re working against time constraints and the rush to get everything done. So once it’s over, you want to just sit back, relax and forget about everything for a while. You think you’re done. But you’re not. Or at least you shouldn’t be.
- We strive to make every ClojureBridge better than the last one. Running a retrospective with all volunteers is a great idea and it’s getting more and more popular among the organizers.. It gives everyone a chance to go through everything that happened. We also always ask our students for feedback on the workshop, and ask them to fill out an anonymous exit survey asking how we did. The summaries are usually shared among the members of ClojureBridge Workshops Google group. We tend to reuse the same survey questions that are published in the organizer’s guide.
- Here are some quotes from the survey. ClojureBridge is all about inclusive, supportive environment and flexible curriculums. It looks like we’re doing a good job in this area, but of course, there’s always room for improvement.
- We always ask the students about the things that they think we should change. Lots of stuff comes up during the workshop, but also through the surveys. There are many pain points around tooling, around writing better curriculums that target different levels of programming skills. This is where we need help, and since all materials are open source, it’s easy for any of you to lend a hand. The last two quotes here mention lack of follow-up activities.
- Students go to this cool event, they learn about Clojure, and then they may or may not know where to search for like minded people and events or resources where they can carry on learning Clojure. Organizers almost always create an attendee mailing list, to make their life easier when they send tons of reminders about the event. So it’s good to send occasional e-mail about a Clojure meetup, or a conference, opportunity grants. If you’re organizing Clojure meetup or a workshop, or some other event, and you don’t know how to reach more women, you could shoot us an e-mail and we’ll help out. I sometimes hear people say “they, meaning women, should make the effort themselves, should come to us, if they’re serious about programming” - that’s just a bad attitude. We shouldn't be expecting things like that, and we shouldn’t make our community into this special club where people have to come to us. A few years ago if I went to a tech meetup it usually meant that I was doubling female attendance. If you look around you today, we have over 60 women attending Clojure/west so reaching out to the minorities really pays off.
- Here’s a very cool thing that the organizers of ClojureBridge in Berlin do. They have this weekly learners group that is about 10 people. Every event starts in a relaxed atmosphere, with a potluck and a chat, then they form groups and hack on something. Sometimes these are one off hacks, sometimes longer running projects. They have a tumblr with their art pieces which is linked here. And on top of that the organizers also made the monthly general Clojure meetup more beginner friendly. It’s become more accessible to ClojureBridge alumni and as a result the turnup is more diverse.
- Don’t forget why we’re doing this: we want more women and other minorities in tech. And why do we want them in tech? To make our workplaces more diverse. And you can’t make it happen unless you hire. So if you happen to be looking for an entry level Clojurist, or someone who’s had experience in other programming languages but is Clojure curious, you’ll find them among ClojureBridge alumni. But there are also other women specific communities, like LambdaLadies, and you may want to contact them. Or if you don’t know who you should contact, you can always contact someone involved with ClojureBridge, and they’ll help you out.