Sat, 23 Apr 2011
Announcing the Scala Crash Course (for women & their friends)
Here is an email I just sent to the email list for PHASE, the Philly Area Scala Enthusiasts:
First, let me introduce myself: Hi, everybody!
I'm Asheesh Laroia, as the "From:" header on this email message indicates. I'm also a Python user, former ocaml user in college, and Debian developer. (Maybe none of those will make me any friends in PHASE....)
I'm writing this because Yuvi and I are planning an event on the Friday evening before Scalathon: a low-cost Scala crash course.
http://www.meetup.com/scala-phase/events/17397558/ says a little more; I can, too:
My goal (I won't claim to speak for Yuvi) is to help encourage a diverse Scalathon that brings new people into the community. By being a "crash course" for people who already know some Scala or another functional programming language, we aim to select for people who can contribute during the big hackathon on so many Scala projects during the weekend. By insisting that attendees of the crash course attend Scalathon, we hope to use the time to enrich the Scalathon event.
The event has a stipulation that I'm borrowing from an effort called RailsBridge: to attend, you must either be a woman, or find a woman who will bring you as her guest. The idea here is to simultaneously make sure anyone who wants to can attend, while also inviting women to join Scala-based communities.
The event is separate from Scalathon; it's an effort to feed people into Scalathon.
If you are a woman who is thinking about attending Scalathon but wants to make sure you have time to sharpen your Scala chops, this event is for you. If you know such a person, please send her a copy of this email. If you're a man in the same situation, we hope you can find the woman in your life who is, too, so that she can invite you.
So -- that's what I'm working with Yuvi.
A bit more personally, I met Yuvi because I work on an open source community outreach website called OpenHatch: http://openhatch.org/. He and I met at a meet-up for that site last year, when I lived in West Philly (on a beautiful street called Hazel). He and I organized a Penn-based open source hackathon you can read about at http://opensource.com/life/10/11/introducing-students-world-open-source-day-1 . Right now I'm based in the Boston area, in Somerville, MA.
I'd love to hear what you all think.
--
-- Asheesh.
http://asheesh.org/FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #4
A: Go west, young man, go west!
Q: What do wabbits do when they get tiwed of wunning awound?
