Railsbridge Success Story: Kinsey Ann Durham

by Kinsey Ann Durham

Tweet reading "Already having so much fun at RailsBridge in Denver! All set and ready to go on Heroku!"

I can honestly tell you that a RailsBridge workshop changed my life. I reluctantly attended my first RailsBridge workshop in November of 2012 with my two girlfriends. I decided to attend the workshop because I wanted to get better at my job of managing developers. I thought it would be great to get a taste of what developers actually did. I never thought that I could become a developer, however. It was really intimidating! My step brother is an awesome developer and when he would talk, everything was over my head and it seemed like he was speaking an alien language! I remember telling my Dad on the phone that I wanted to be around developers, something attracted me to writing code, but there was no way I could do it.

Attending my first RailsBridge workshop was awesome! I met a great network of people and even my future mentor. That’s when I started to build my network in the Ruby community, simply by attending this event. I remember telling my friend at the event that I was going to write code from now on!

It wasn’t that simple. I didn’t become a developer right away. Over one year, three RailsBridge workshops, an apprenticeship at thoughtbot, three conference talks later, I finally feel that I can call myself a developer! I am going to be working as the Teaching Assistant and developer for Galvanize’s gSchool. I get to mentor, teach, write code and most importantly, help others find their passion in writing code. I could not be more excited, and I have RailsBridge to thank for my newfound career! Thank you to all of the volunteers, organizers, sponsors. You truly are making a difference in many people’s lives!

Railsbridge Success Story: Kinsey Ann Durham

RailsBridge as Passion Project

GitHub has a fabulous documentary series interviewing women in tech about their “passion projects.”  Rachel Myers has been an inspiring leader in the San Francisco RailsBridge community.  We’re delighted that she chose to speak about RailsBridge as her passion project:

She also writes about RailsBridge as a “starfish” organization — a big part of her contribution to RailsBridge has been in thinking about how to scale the organization in a way to make it resilient, while still preserving the ability for volunteers to step forth at any point, from any where, and make amazing things happen.

RailsBridge as Passion Project