This morning I signed into our group chat and Tim (one of our awesome operations team) had posted the following:
Hey, this is cool http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lindaliukas/hello-ruby
Clicking through I found it went to the “Hello Ruby” Kickstarter by Linda Liukas. Linda is using her experience of working at CodeAcademy and helping out at Rails Girls to create a beginners guide to Ruby, but not any beginners guide, a guide specifically targeted at children with the lead character being a small girl called Ruby. I immediately saw the potential behind writing this sort of book and committed reInteractive to backing it up.
We need more Ruby developers and we desperately need more female developers. We work hard at reInteractive to make this happen, with our team helping with Rails Girls and our Installfest and Development Hub initiatives. You’ll often see our developers posting and tweeting about issues relating to balancing the ratio and calling out practices which exclude anyone from learning.
The truth is that this sort of book is a major part of what is missing in helping a new generation of girls to discover the joys and wonder of programming. Just like the GoldieBox Video we need things like this to change the (sadly) ingrained mindset of a culture that slipstreams amazing female talent into non technical fields.
So, good call Linda, let’s get this book published and out there! You have our corporate support!
