Smut on Rails

In the April 2009 edition of the Golden Gate Ruby Conference, Matt Aimonetti gave a talk on CouchDB. The summary provided at the website seems interesting and even useful. Apparently, to prevent any risk of his talk seeming dry, Matt contrasted using CouchDB to performing like a porn star (his slides can be found here).

This is what triggered various discussions about whether or not the Rails community makes women feel comfortable.

At ThoughtWorks, a lot of us enjoy Ruby and even Rails, and use the same in many of our client projects. Plus, as with a lot of things, we tie a sense of responsibility to what we use and promote. This is why the above talk and the general implications of it became a cause of concern for many ThoughtWorkers.

Martin Fowler has written in his bliki about it: Smut on Rails

I believe Martin sums up the topic well, highlighting the key intentions behind the community's activities, and the role we need to play.

Personally, I believe had a presentation like Matt's been given in an event like the ThoughtWorks-hosted Ruby Funday, the women participants (many of whom were still in college or new to the industry) would have felt uncomfortable and hesitant to attend such events in the future. As speakers, we should be careful when we try to add humour to our talks and retain focus on the subject without trying to be unnecessarily controversial.

Tags: technology:general, technology:events, technology:thoughtworks, technology:talks, technology:ruby, technology:rails Last modified 03:00 Fri, 1 May 2009 by AmanKing. Accessed 431 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.