Episode 22 – Sarah Mei

Sarah’s Bio:
Sarah is a Ruby and JavaScript developer based in San Francisco, California. As the Chief Consultant at DevMynd Software, she spends most of her time pairing with her clients’ developers, helping level up their team. Her particular areas of interest are Object-Oriented Programming, service refactorings, growing teams, and inter-developer dynamics.
She has written about my experiences pair programming and also her approach to testing but her most popular article, by a huge margin, is about the dangers of shiny new technology.
Sarah is writing a book with Sandi Metz about how to refactor Rails applications towards happiness and she can be found on Twitter, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Today we have Sarah Mei. Sarah is a JavaScript developer, a Ruby developer, a conference organizer, a speaker, an author, and a lot more. So, Sarah, how are you?
Sarah: I’m doing well. How are you?
Arsalan: I’m doing great. I know a lot about you. I know you have your hands in a lot of different things. You are involved in the community, you’re a programmer, and I think I can call you and activist of some sort because you talk about a lot of issues that people face in conferences, especially women. But, before we do all that, I want people to get a feel for who you are. So, could you describe yourself for the audience? How do you see yourself?
Sarah: I’ve been a developer for about 20 years now. I am currently the chief consultant at Devmynd. What that usually means is that I do short-term, 3 to 6-month projects with teams. I go in and help them level up on something like pair programming, Ruby, Javascript, test leveling, factoring and etc. That’s what I do for my day job.
Sarah:  I also do other things as well. I am one of the organizers for RubyConf and RailsConf, which are the 2 largest Ruby conferences in the world as part of my work with Ruby Central. I am also on the board of RubyTogether, which is a group that is working to make Ruby’s structure more stable. I am also one of the founders of Rails Bridge, which is working to get underrepresented folks into the Rails communities. I’ve also started working on something called Bridge Foundry, which is a higher level group which is helping to bring the Rails Bridge model to other communities.
Sarah: I also do a lot of conference speaking. Most of my talks are about things like software design, team dynamics, how those two things intersect, how you build software in a group, and how you do that with developers who tend to not have the highest levels of people skills.
Arsalan: That’s absolutely true. People skills is a skill that programmers tend to struggle with. I think a lot of us are introverts by nature. We are not used to expressing our opinions or sharing our feelings. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the struggles that new and aspiring developers have gone through in your experience?
Sarah: Yes, absolutely. I do some mentoring with one of the code schools here in San Francisco called Hackbright Academy. They are a women’s hack Academy that teaches Python.

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