I like doing things that seem meaningful and there are so many of those things that I have kept very busy.
The ultimate human project! My kids, Elsie and Sadie, are the best people ever. Also, having kids is really hard! Wow! My favorite book on the topic is All Joy, No Fun, which I recommend HIGHLY.
On July 4, 2018, I took the holiday to make a plan to help prevent the rise of fascism in America, mostly focused on winning a Democratic majority in the House. When Elsie was born, I'd quit pretty much everything besides work and family, but decided to create time for some politics work. It ended up including making a worksheet to help other people make an action plan, knocking on doors in Modesto, Turlock, and Kansas City, raising and donating money to several awesome campaigns, writing postcards and making phone calls, and talking to the people in my life about voting and the importance of the midterms.
I worked closely with two co-organizers to throw an 80-person inclusive, feminist programming conference in the woods to rave reviews ... twice! Each year, I handled all of the fundraising for the conference, and raised a bunch of money in sponsorships to offset the cost for attendees. I was also the weekends' emcee, and improv'd a song about how great all the sponsors were.
I helped co-found and run a chill, welcoming monthly Ruby meetup in San Francisco with three other amazing organizers!
As chair of the new RailsBridge board, I led a small group of senior RailsBridge volunteers in establishing practices to make RailsBridge a more sustainable organization that is easier to navigate, and worked toward reducing volunteer burnout. Learn more about it on the RailsBridge blog.
I led the development of Double Union's voting and membership platform, an open source Rails app we call Arooo, as well as supported the DU board in technology-related decisions.
I managed the onboarding process for new Double Union membership, sent membership acceptance / rejection emails, reminded people to pay their dues, answered many questions, and was inspired enough to take on building out needed membership management tools in the DU web app.
I mentored organizers and assisted them with finding venues and sponsors for at least one (sometimes two!) 50-100 person, free Rails workshops per month in San Francisco, bringing my special flavor of fun and love of details to the workshop planning process.
I built out the admin functionality for the Double Union application and voting app, where prospective members apply to join Double Union and current members review and vote on said applications. We also manage dues and various other things through the app, and open sourced it so that other cool feminist hacker/makerspaces can use it, too!
Bridge Troll is an open-source software project that has undergone three incarnations since its inception. I took it on because as someone who helped RailsBridge organizers, I wanted there to be software that made organizing easy. I also wanted to know who keeps coming back, and to be able to look at big-picture data about student and volunteer attendance.
I handled the role of product owner and product manager on Bridge Troll — consulting with other organizers about features that would be important and working with code contributors to make sure what we want is feasible.
I made this website. Pretty good, right?
I highly recommend checking out my site archive. LillieChilen.com: the original is a piece of art.
I made a single-serving website to try to convince people to use the word "woman" to refer to female adults rather than "girl".
As a gift for my dad, I built him a little calculator that uses the Bill James algorithm to determine if the lead is safe in a college basketball game. This was possibly the first time I used jQuery.
I spoke at RailsConf 2016 about why internship programs can be amazing, how to implement a good one, and how they benefit the engineering team as much as the intern.
I turned this talk into two blog posts for the Omada tech blog, if you're not the 40-minute video type:
I spoke at RailsConf 2015 about how to manage an open source software project in a sustainable way, drawing on my open source experience managing projects for RailsBridge and Double Union.
RailsBridge workshops teach from a set of open-source curricula, including a guide to getting a Rails development environment set up, an "app in a day" Rails curriculum, and an intro to front end web development (HTML & CSS with a little JavaScript). I helped maintain all these things, merging PRs and answering questions.
I noticed that there was too big of a gap between the original RailsBridge curriculum and the self-guided intermediate curriculum, so I wrote a curriculum to live in between, in which students use Rails error messages to guide the development of a simple job board. The curriculum also features fun discussion points, so that there are fewer words on the screen and more encouragement to collaborate as a class.
I wrote a new RailsBridge curriculum with this cool dude named Travis Grathwell. It's for people who had done the intro curriculum a bunch of times but hadn't taken The Next Step with their Rails knowledge.
The organizer cookbook lived in several disparate places, and I grabbed all that content, sorted through it, and put it up on the GitHub wiki for the RailsBridge repo. Part of the mission of RailsBridge has been to enable other people to put on their own workshops, and having good documentation and suggestions / support for first-time organizers is a huge part of that.
I was part of a team that created an umbrella organization called Bridge Foundry, through which RailsBridge has 501(c)3 status.
I also overhauled the RailsBridge website, twice.