Tag Archives: work

Ladies Learning Code: JavaScript

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A couple of weekends ago I helped out at Ladies Learning Code‘s Intro to JavaScript workshop. I was a ‘mentor’, one of the large group of devs who volunteered to hang out with some eager learners all day and help them decipher programming in JavaScript. It was pretty awesome, and I can say with absolute confidence that I’ve never felt better about being a programmer than I did (and do) after that workshop.

The previous weeks had been completely insane at work and we were on deadlines that were sometimes physically painful to think about. I had lost an entire day of productivity (one I couldn’t afford to have lost) to trying to decipher an OO JavaScript framework another coworker had built, one that was full of gigantic nested object literals and confusing (for me) references, and I felt pretty terrible about my skills at that point. I strongly considered cancelling on the workshop at least five times and only barely managed to convince myself the night before that it would be fine.

It was, of course, fine.

That’s us before any of the participants got there–just organizers and mentors (note: all photos thanks to the fantastic Peter Newhook!). Yeah, there were a bucketload of us giving up a Sunday to show up at CSI Annex and talk code all day. At this point I was still mildly terrified that I would just somehow forget everything I knew about JavaScript (the thing I do for a living, all day, every day). I sometimes wonder how I don’t explode in a ball of worry.

And there’s everyone (photograph by Breanna Hughes)! I know. So much enthusiasm.

Pearl Chen and Christina Truong led us through a pile of beginner JavaScript and covered a surprising amount of ground in one day, including really great explanations of objects, some jQuery, and some fun demos. After the first exercise I finally relaxed a bit and remembered that yeah, I’m okay at this stuff. Go figure.

There’s nothing like helping someone work out the kinks in their understanding of something and watching them experience a huge epiphany. It’s ridiculously rewarding, and I got to do it for not one but four great ladies!

(Check out my almost-six-year-old Dell in the foreground. Keep on truckin’, old buddy.)

Pauline, Emma, Laura, Shetu–thanks for sticking with it and being so damn excited about learning new stuff. You guys made it one of the best times I’ve had in a while, and reminded me why I love writing code all day–we make cool stuff happen. And thanks to Ladies Learning Code for doing something amazing: making people excited to learn code, excited to say they’re learning code, excited to hang out with other people who do too. It’s a great community. I’m glad to be a part of it.

(Side note: Shetu, the lovely learner on the far right in that photo, actually interviewed me for this Globe & Mail feature after the Ruby workshop last fall! SMALL WORLD.)

Things are getting better

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It has been an insane few weeks.

Last night I went to the second of two Fucked Up-curated Christmas shows at the Great Hall, to benefit the COUNTERfit Harm Reduction Program and the Barriere Lake Legal Defense Fund. Fucked Up performed at the first show, but last night’s lineup featured Bonjay, Ohbijou, The Rural Alberta Advantage and Sloan (playing all of 1996′s One Chord to Another!).

Serious nostalgia trip–I think the last time I saw the Rural Alberta Advantage was in maybe early 2007 (definitely long before Hometowns was released). I saw them a ton of times in my first year and a half of university, since they were friends of all the bands I was in, and I joined them once at a raucous show at the Embassy in Kensington (actual capacity: something like 25, attendance at those shows: felt like at least 60). It was pretty great to see them play again after so many years and so many shows under their belt.

They broke out “Summertime”, which I once covered at the only solo non-recital performance I’ve ever played in my life. I played two songs (it was at a cabaret/variety show sort of thing) and the other one was a Sloan cover, weirdly enough.

And Sloan … I’ve seen them something like 20 times–I hesitate to go count the actual number–and this was one hell of a fun evening. Horns for “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and “Take The Bench”, finally a chance to see “Junior Panthers”, “500 Up”(!!) and “Snowsuit Sound” in the encore … and then Leslie Feist came out to kick up the jams for “She Says What She Means”. Basically the best.


I also got to play a great show at the Rivoli last weekend–last performance of 2011–with the old Massey Hall crowd. Plenty of wonderful familiar faces in the audience, including a handful of former Massey friends who came to join us for the occasion, made it a pretty amazing night for all of us on stage. Damn, I love these folks.

I also received a Stockhausen LP and a sweet, sweet lunchbox for Christmas from my boyfriend, appeared in the Toronto Star (full article here), and signed an offer of permanent employment at my place of work–pretty happy to be sticking around with my fantastic coworkers.

Recently at work, in fact, I helped work on an HTML5 prototype for a huge agency pitch the company did in New Jersey at the beginning of December. We did really well, and the project’s taken on a life of its own, continuing to be built and refined; it will eventually (in January) be revised into a real project instead of just a demo, and I’ll be working on that too. It’s pretty neat to have been involved in something so huge only a couple of months after starting. Daunting, to be sure–and there were a lot of stressful hours and a few delirious late nights in the office, including one time where there were only two of us and they were filming a movie down in the alley outside our office building involving many teenagers shrieking at the same time; both of us thought we were about to be murdered, I think.

But here we are now and tomorrow’s the last day before the holidays and I have a job to come back to, some great things on the horizon (like Love is a Poverty You Can Sell at Next Stage!) and a trip home coming up fast. Things are all right! (even though we didn’t get Yu Darvish)

Oh, you know

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I never post, I know, sometimes it’s hard to decide what to pull out of the jumble and tease into a real, coherent string of words. Life’s been a whirlwind lately.

So around the same time I started this incarnation of my blogging self, I started a new job. It’s been six weeks now(!) and I think I’ve mostly settled in, getting used to the routines and the rhythm of things, understanding what the deadlines are and just how stuff works. It’s a great place, at least from what I’ve experienced so far. Chaotic, to be sure, but it’s kind of how I do things. Order is weird.

It’s really nice, too:

Taken, I assume, prior to my first deadline — in the office early, in the morning darkness, wondering how it was all going to get done. (It got done.)

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying myself. I still don’t quite believe it when someone says things like “Well, Ruhee’s the one who knows HTML5 here”, or “Ruhee’s our expert on [whatever]“. I don’t feel like an expert in anything, really, not when I have coworkers who know more than I feel like I might ever know, and when a year ago I didn’t know what any of the stuff I’m doing now even was.

I have a music degree. I did a postgrad certificate in web development because it seemed like a good idea and something that might get me an okay job, even though the course titles — “Web Application Development”, “Database Design” — at the time seemed dull, horrible, boring. And I ended up loving it, so much that now I say I’m a “web developer and musician” instead of a “musician and web developer”. I love doing this stuff. It’s exciting and cool and lets my brain think about stuff that isn’t music, which is nice for a change.

Yeah. I’m not an expert (yet). But it’s neat to see how much I’ve learned in six weeks. I looked at my notes from my first week the other day, and it said stuff like “How to animate a stack of images?” and “Can HTML5 canvas do this?” Now I’ve got programming for iOS touch events under my belt, and CSS3 animations, and all this other stuff. This is easily the best part about being a developer. I consider myself lucky if I show up to work and I don’t know how to do 50% of the stuff on my to-do list. If I leave work knowing how to do all those things, it’s been a really good day.

Also, one of my coworkers introduced me to the office shared music drive the other day, which has already provided me with countless hours of good listenin’, and I’m sure will continue to do so for quite some time. Another one provided me with a bunch of Arthur Russell albums I didn’t have (they are amazing) and completely bested me in Talking Heads knowledge. I guess I’m in pretty good hands.