This blog post is a follow-up to my last post, “The Insanity of Choice.”

After many days of painful soul searching, we decided that moving to a warmer climate with more attractive housing prices was not actually going to bring us any increase in happiness.

I reflected upon the couple of years I spent living in northern Virginia outside of DC in a “Stepford Wives” suburb called Ashburn. Although the houses were beautiful, the people were gorgeous, the weather was delightful, and there were endless new places and things to discover, I never felt quite happy there. And that had to do with the pace of life in this area and the constant pressure to keep up with everyone. People were so caught in their own current that they barely looked up at me when I said “hello”; there was no time to talk to a stranger. People were too busy trying to get ahead.

I recall looking out upon the infinite sprawl of suburbia; thousands of nearly identical, perfect little houses all in rows. I always felt a little sick when I saw this. I couldn’t help but think of Agent Smith’s summation of the human race, “A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet…” While I tend to have a bit more love for human-kind than Mr. Smith, suburbia in Northern Virginia was quite a sight.

Our old neighborhood in Ashburn, VA

I also tend to assume that living in suburbia tends to go along with living a high consumption lifestyle. I was always on the road when I lived in Ashburn; almost daily trips to Target, coffee shops, playgrounds, playdates, the zoo, baby-sign language classes, museums and more. My daughter barely had a moment to herself with me at home because we spent so little time at home. And to this day she constantly craves being on the road all the time, even though it seems to cause her an alarming level of duress.

Then I think about the lavish suburbian birthday parties that I’d be pressured to keep up with, the urge to buy all the coolest toys that everyone else buys for their kids, and I get overwhelmed with how quickly my simple Maine life could turn into a fast-paced, high-energy suburbia life. Since moving back to Maine we’ve fallen into a warm daily rhythm of reading books and playing with simple toys at home; we mix up the week by making a couple trips to the local Toy Library (which costs $2/kid) or by heading to a friend’s house for the day. We cook almost all of our meals at home and we rarely go out “shopping”. I don’t feel this pressure to keep up with what everyone else is doing, because almost everyone else is doing the same thing I’m doing!

This isn’t to say that if we moved to a warm, lovely place like North Carolina that we couldn’t continue to maintain a lifestyle that was in line with our values. We had Adam’s co-worker (Thanks Brent!) driving by rentals and taking photos for us, and we even had a lease in hand for a place to live. But there would be that urge to be out and about all the time since we’d literally be starting all over again. We’d need to establish a network: friends, a mechanic, doctors, babysitters, a dentist, a new favorite coffee shop, a new farmer’s market, a new grocery store, etc. Relocating to a new area brings a certain euphoria, combined with a sure dose of exhaustion, especially with three little babes in tow.

Maine certainly has its flaws, like frigid weather (try pumping gas in -15 degree weather with winds gusting at 30mph and tell me how awesome Maine is), decrepit housing at oddly inflated prices, and you probably spend a good 1/8th of your life shoveling snow. But no one will be making a complaint to a housing association if I decided on an Allagash induced whim to paint my house purple and erect a lawn statue of Bilbo Baggins. And no one will have anyone to call when I’ve been too busy to mow my 10 sq ft patch of grass (which, in NoVA is what they proudly call a yard). When it came down to it, the thought of suburbia was terrifying. When I’ve made the case for Maine in the past, I’ve used this argument: “Recall the hobbits in Lord of the Rings; they were so far removed from the rest of the world, that even when the threat of all middle earth was at hand, they could feel no threat at all.” I figure that if this country is going to fall apart, the chaos would hit Maine last (right after Alaska goes up in flames). So I always get this feeling of ignorant bliss up here. No one cares to fuck with us because we don’t really matter. And that’s kinda cool. In a hobbit sort of way.

Adam and I were also listening to an audio book during the last couple of weeks, “Stop Acting Rich,” by Thomas Stanley, the same guy who wrote, “The Millionaire Mind.” Since Adam and I tend to enjoy living outside of the mainstream in most cases, this book really fortified our inclination to stay in Maine. Fleeing to suburbia would have prompted us to spend more cash (in order to keep up with those acting rich around us, even if unconsciously). In Maine we rarely go “out.” Mostly, we hang out at home with our kids until we get bored enough to invite some friends over. And when we do entertain friends it consists of playing Catan, watching old Firefly episodes, sitting around the computer and watching funny youtube videos of car crashes or hilarious episodes of the Mighty Boosh. We have tasty beer at our disposal, lifelong friends, and the internets. And these simple things do bring us great happiness.

Allagash, elixir of choice!

So what did we decide to do with this acclaimed “freedom of location”? We decided to stay right here in the frigid wasteland. I have my complaints, but I’m actually quite happy. I’ll groan through the winters but wear them like a badge of honor. I’ll continue to complain about the small-mindedness of simple, rural Mainers but not before I buy my delicious veggies at their charming little farms. I’ll think of those grand houses that sell for pennies south of the Mason Dixon line and then curse our Yankee ancestors for making New England such a desirable yet expensive place to live. On the coldest February day I’ll think of the friendliness of the sun only 500 miles south of me and sometimes I’ll wish I could be blanketed in its warmth. But when the sun brings relief in mid April, it will be that much sweeter, and I’ll not waste a sunny day inside with the kids. And when my kids get old enough to complain about living in such a cold and boring state, I’ll point them back to these blog posts!

I’ve never had commitment problems with other humans, but I find myself totally unable to commit to a geographic location; and the pressure to commit coupled with the inability to do so has slowly driven me insane. For many people, the question of “where to live?” is answered easily. I assume that most people in our country find work and settle down (if not immediately, then eventually) in their home state or even near their home town. And if they don’t end up buying a house in their home state then they follow a job to another state and settle there.

Maine is awesome for a couple of months

But freedom of location is becoming a reality for more and more people. I think it was Tim Ferris who first used the term “geoarbitrage” in the “Four Hour Work Week,” to exemplify the awesomeness that your life could be if you could free yourself from a desk, a building, a specific town, a specific country even. If you didn’t have to be somewhere (like at your desk at your company’s office) then you could go anywhere. And although I question some of Ferris’ ideas, I do support the concept of freedom of location since it coincides directly with our unalienable right, “the pursuit of happiness.”

We attained freedom of location in mid 2007 when Adam got hired at Intridea. They are an awesome high-end software development and products company in DC who allow all of their employees to work from home. And “home” doesn’t mean close to DC where you could be called into the office at any time; it actually means anywhere you call home. Adam’s co-workers are happily spread out across the country, from California, to Atlanta, North Carolina, Alabama, (and Maine) and are free to travel and relocate as desired.

We were living in northern Virginia when Adam started working at Intridea, and when we were granted this amazing freedom we decided to go back to Maine, our home state. We had a 1 year old daughter at the time and I was pregnant with our son. We rationalized returning to Maine to get support from our families and friends. It was a decision based on logistics, not on emotion.

It wasn’t long after we got back to Maine that we remembered why we left it in the first place. It’s incredibly over-priced, the housing market is full of really old houses that are falling apart, it’s economically depressed and depressing, it’s absolutely frigid for 6 months of the year, and our families and friends are spread so far apart across the state that we can’t seem to ever make anyone happy. That’s not to say there isn’t anything nice about Maine. Of course the coastline and mountains are gorgeous, there’s lots of undeveloped and preserved land, and access to lots of small farms. But Maine is called “Vacationland” for a good reason; it’s a great place to visit. It’s a rugged and tiring place to live.

But this is the reality of Maine: frigid north

We realized we made a bad decision about 2 months after we got here. Yet, we’ve lingered and suffered here for 2 1/2 years because we have been too paralyzed by choice (and guilt) to go anywhere else. How do you explain to your parents, whom love their grandchildren so dearly, that you’re going half way across the country (or the world, even), not because you have to for a job or anything, but simply because you feel like it.

We have been on the verge of buying a house here for the past couple of months, and I’m not sure what drove us to that decision other than a bad renting experience and just plain exhaustion; it’s exhausting to have all this freedom and not know what to do with it. When we got here 2 years ago, we spent months just talking about where else we could go; and when you can go anywhere, where do you go? When you have (now three) small children, do you conform to society’s (and family’s) expectations to be responsible and settle down and buy a house in order to give your children that sense of stability? After all, it seems like it’s our social obligation to get the largest mortgage we can possibly afford, make payments on 2000 sq/ft for the next 30 years, pay the HOA fees, keep our grass cut neatly and put the kids through the same government run education system for 13 years of their life.

The moment we buy a house we sign away this highly sought-after freedom. Usually, the most difficult aspect in attaining “freedom of location” is in finding a job that affords you that luxury. And we already have that. Are we willing to sign that freedom away in exchange for a mediocre life? But after almost three years of having this freedom and not knowing what to do with it, and being too afraid to actually do anything with it, are we better off just submitting to the fate of staying in the state we were born and raised in, even though we’re not that happy with it?

When do you take the reins and pioneer your own life and your own happiness, even at the expense of your family and friends’ happiness and at the expense of the “norm”? What are other families doing that have this freedom?

So while geoarbitrage is new hotness, it comes with the “tyranny of choice.” Which can drive you insane. Because the open-endedness of “choice” is torturous.

Do you use Vim? Emacs? Do you use Gemcutter for gem hosting? Do you listen to Soma FM? If you use free software, think about donating time or money this holiday season to support the individuals that put in long hours creating the awesome software that makes your life easier.

Adam and I have spent some time this month thinking about donating to charity in lieu of getting gifts for each other since our own needs are well met. And that’s when I began to wonder how we could donate directly to software developers that create free and/or open source tools that we use everyday, as a way to show our gratitude.

There are so many free tools that we get to use and enjoy daily. Showing our support for the tireless work these developers do helps to ensure that people will have access to these great tools in the future. There is a large group of people that help to keep us geeks up and running. This is a perfect time of year to say “thank you, I appreciate your work” by sending them some cash or asking them how you can help out with a project. You’ll probably feel uber geeky for doing so and you get to directly affect the happiness of people that help to make you happy; and that’s pure awesome.

In our little Ruby community, there are amazing people that give so much of themselves to create useful tools for us. I can’t help but think of Why The Lucky Stiff, and wonder if he might still be around if our community had been more thoughtful in showing our appreciation for the work that he did. Even with his absence there remain a great many people that make a true effort to support the Ruby and Rails community. I saw Jim Freeze and the volunteers at LSRC 2009 work tirelessly to create a great space for our community to gather. People that create free tools for learning Ruby like Jim Weirich (Ruby Koans), Jeremy MacAnally (Humble Little Ruby Book) and James Edward Gray II (Ruby Quiz) have obviously given of themselves without motive for profit. For many of us, programming is a job, but it’s also a hobby and a lifestyle. We are so used to information just being available to us that it’s easy to forget that it’s only available because someone took a lot of time to create those resources. That’s why it makes sense to think about showing our gratitude to the members of our community that add value to our experience.

Lately, there is a lot of talk about Ruby becoming “enterprise” and what that might mean for the core community. As the Ruby and Rails communities continue to grow it’s important that we support each other in our efforts to keep the landscape nurturing so that we can grow organically and communally. The best way for a community to stay authentic, even through sudden and steep growth periods, is for it to be loyal and supportive of its contributing members.

So if someone inspired you to learn Ruby or Rails and you’re happier for it, let them know how their enthusiasm inspired you. If someone spent a lot of time answering your newb questions, you could send them a thank you note and maybe a bottle of wine.

And of course, being a charitable geek means being thankful for all the cool tools we get to use. If you’re using shareware, consider upgrading to a premium version. If you use iStat Menus then throw them some cash. Teleport accepts donations as well. If you use Github and love it, then pay for it! If you are using open source software (like Gemcutter or Haml) then ask how you can get involved by contributing some developer time to the project. Donations made to support to Vim are actually going straight to a children’s center in Uganda where there is an aids crisis.

Of course we’re all dealing with the chaos of a very busy season. But, if you find some free time on your hands, consider giving something back to the people in our community that have gone out of their way create really useful tools that have made a difference in your life. This holiday season, thank some geeks for the work they’ve done!

I think it’s fairly common for programmers to build applications to meet a personal need. When I found out I was pregnant with our third child this past May I didn’t intend to spend my pregnancy writing a Sinatra application for naming babies, but I’ve had so much fun and have really grown as a programmer by doing so.

At the beginning of the pregnancy I was using a google spreadsheet to create a list of name ideas for the baby that friends and family could add suggestions to. You can view it here. It worked ok for a couple of weeks until I realized it would be nice if people could add comments and share their opinions about each name. I also thought it would be better if people could rate each name so I could see the general popularity of the individual names. I could not find an application that already offered this service in a simple, straightforward way.

For anyone that’s ever had the experience of expecting a baby, they’ve gone through the process of trying to come up with names, receiving lots input from friends and family, and probably felt overwhelmed at trying to keep track of all the great (and not so great) ideas. Thus, I figured this must be a solved problem, yet, I couldn’t find a nice, simple solution for it. Alas, NamingTogether.com was born!

From the start I wanted this to be incredibly simple; the expectant mother or couple goes through a very minimal signup process; with just a few graces of your fingers across the keyboard you’re ready to go with your own name list and a unique link to provide to anyone that you want input from. I wanted the user’s friends and family to be able to add name ideas, leave comments, and rate names without having to login to the site or go through any nonsense.

Simple interface for adding and rating names

I decided to use Sinatra for this application. Previously, I had only coded a few small projects in Ruby and had not learned Rails or Sinatra yet. I figured that since the application was going to be rather small and succinct, Sinatra would be a good fit. As Adam and I delved deeper into the development process we discovered that using Rails would have made our lives a lot easier, but we stuck with Sinatra nonetheless. We’ll be working on a really thorough post about the development process very soon, and we’ll cover the challenges we faced using Sinatra on this project.

I spent the first several weeks learning Sinatra and DataMapper and writing some very basic functionality, and when my demands for the application far outgrew my knowledge-base I turned to Adam for assistance. He really helped to pull the application together. He hadn’t played with Sinatra before either, so he got to learn something new by working on Naming Together.

Being married to a programmer certainly has its benefits; after our two kids are put to bed in the evening, we get to sit down together on the couch with our laptops and hack away at things together. Adam has always been a great teacher, so the craftsman and apprentice relationship works out really well for us. I have great memories of late night programming sessions together during the last several months.

This experience has enlightened me on the process of working with other people on a project, creating tickets, closing tickets, and holding myself accountable to get things done when I commit to them. I also have a more thorough understanding of git, and even got to use Heroku for this project.  I would not have gained this level of understanding in Ruby and Sinatra without working on an application that truly benefited me in some way.

As a stay at home mom to two young children, at the end of the day, I often have very little energy and motivation to hack away at random projects or to push myself to learn something new. And since I don’t program professionally, I don’t get that working experience that really helps new programmers to become great programmers. Working on this application was what pushed me to keep learning new things and to become a better programmer. I was so excited for the kids to fall asleep each night just so I could implement some new functionality, or look at Adam’s commits from the night before to make sure I understood what he had implemented.

Choosing a name for the application was also a pretty fun process. I had a textmate doc filled with random words, phrases or ideas that came to me throughout the process of writing this application. One day as I was staring blankly at the document, feeling rather hopeless about coming up with the perfect name, I asked myself for the hundredth time, “What is this application really about, at its core?” All of a sudden, the name just dawned on me as I answered, “It’s about naming our babies, together.”

After months of evening coding sessions, the application is now live and ready to be hammered on. I’ve got some open issues that we’re going to be working on soon, like pagination, options for sorting names, option for parents to veto names altogether, etc. I would love feedback about the application, as this is going to be something that I’m going to maintain and support, even after a name is decided for our own baby bundle, due this December.

Every girl wants her first time to be special. I wanted my first official Rails event to be something small, intimate and meaningful. I tried to choose my first event carefully so as to not end up in a place like Las Vegas, from which I would be coming home feeling like a sold-out whore. Admittedly, I sound like an emo teenager but, it was important that my “first time” with Rails would be consequential. With that clarified, I’m so happy that I ended up going to Rails Camp New England last weekend after a last minute opening made it possible.

Close to 30 of us set down some roots for the weekend in an old Maine house in Bryant Pond. There was no internet access (except for an open access point near “the rock wall”); yet, somehow, cutting the cord felt invigorating. I actually had to talk to REAL people if I had a question, rather than rely on google’s infinite wisdom. And talking to people led to some really interesting conversation which, in my opinion, was the best part of the whole weekend. The veterans in the group shared experiences garnered from 20+ years as developers, and the young guys added so much energy to the room when they talked about their work. I spent so much time just talking to new people, to old friends, and even to myself at times, that I actually felt human. There was something humanizing about connecting with other people in a common but, visceral way.

There were Werewolf games, sharing of code, dining together, drinking together, collaborating creatively, sleeping in rooms together, canoeing, games of munchkin, lots of maiming in Urban Terror, and gathering over warm fires to roast marshmallows; all of these things seemed to tie each of us together in a very real way.

When Monday morning came, I found myself not wanting to leave the house or the people I had met. Clearly, this was an stunningly intimate experience, and I’m guessing that intimacy is generally hard to come by in groups of developers. I found myself being thankful I hadn’t gone to Rails Conf this year because, this was the perfect initiatory Rails event. I came out of it feeling even more enamored with Ruby and Rails, and the community that supports these languages. Kudos to Pat and Brian for making this event possible and doing their part to preserve the idiosyncrasies of the community.

Could it be that truckers and programmers have a lot in common?

The dream I had last night prompted me to reflect upon the nomadic life of truckers and how they actually share several commonalities with programmers through their professional lifestyle.

Let me start by giving a quick synopsis of the dream:

Progmatica, a language agnostic programming group that meets weekly at coffee shops in Portland, Maine, decided to hold their next meeting at Dysart’s Truck Stop in Bangor, Maine. The truckers were disgruntled with the group of “learn-ed men” that set up shop in their domain, but they were duly entertained and so they sat back and kept a curious but watchful eye on our group. We gobbled up greasy homefries and dined on delicious homemade cherry pie as we discussed Dimitri’s talk on Seaside from hackon last week.

The trucker crowd seemed to be interested in our conversation and several men wearing the plaid shirts that are so traditional in northern Maine approached our table. They ended up being jovial, comical, even well-educated guys. Throughout the day Casey (organizer of Progmatica) managed to convince these truckers to change professions. They became programmers and joined our ranks.

Progmatica went back to meeting in renegade coffee shops and over the next several years we kept in touch with the reformed truckers. We were sitting around sipping coffee and chatting about Scala one day when we noticed that the trucker devs were showing up to join us. We had hearty conversation, laughed loud and often, and enjoyed their company.

But as time passed the mood got more mellow and the ex-truckers started to shift nervously. After some silence, one spoke, “You know, had you told us that the life of a programmer is just as solitary and lonely as the life of a trucker, we might have continued to drive trucks.” Another piped in, “It’s not that we don’t like writing software. But we had this impression that it was going to be a lot more exciting than driving hundreds of miles on the open highway all alone. In fact, it’s been just about the same.”

They explained that sitting in front of a computer screen for 8-15 hours a day was not unlike staring out the windshield of a big truck all day. And that much like programmers have a need to descend into their “caves” to be productive, a trucker’s cab serves as his own cave. In response to the isolation and general loneliness of being on the road they enjoyed short conversations with other truckers over the CB Radio. This was about as much communication as they had with anyone as a programmer, they explained; short quips with other devs on twitter was their major social outlet as they worked.

When they needed to get out of their trucks to stretch, eat, and socialize they’d stop at the truck stop and meet up with their trucker buddies for some food and chatter. Similarly, when programmers tired of sitting in their cushy chairs they would sometimes head to the coffee shop in hopes of meeting some friends and for some refueling of caffeine. They said they were away from their wives and families just as often in both professions and spent just as much time alone; seeing as the pay was about the same, they couldn’t really see why they left one job for the other.

The original Progmatica group sat there, quite stunned at the reality of all this. And here ends the dream.

The dream is of course, pretty self-explanatory. The dream seemed to give me a negative feeling of both professions. But what is very intriguing to me is how both professions are more than just day jobs. They truly are lifestyles. A trucker wears certain clothes, uses certain trucker lingo, bonds and identifies with other truckers and even though their days are long and lonesome, they all share a certain camaraderie regarding the lifestyle; oftentimes that camaraderie and connectedness is what drives the trucker, even as he drives alone down his endless road.

The group of programmers that I know have many of these qualities as well. Being a developer is also a lifestyle. You don’t stop being a programmer at 5pm, though somedays I’m sure you wish you could. Often, you stay up all hours of the night trying to meet a deadline, trying to solve a problem, trying to write beautiful code. And, although you sit in your office truly alone in your space, somehow you feel connected. You know there are other developers that are up as late as you are, pounding energy drinks, listening to music, typing away in a room lit only by the stark light of your monitors. Developers certainly have their own lingo and easily identify and bond quickly with other developers. Most of us love to drink coffee, to eat at diners, and require being isolated in our caves in order to produce our best work.

I think there is a certain beauty to really living your work. What results from that is passion and bliss. While truckers and programmers are often misunderstood, I think most of them are damn happy people.

When Casey Rosenthal, organizer of the Maine Ruby User Group and hacker extraordinaire, asked me to recreate all of Matt Aimonetti’s slides for a CouchDB presentation, I was excited for the challenge. I had a lot of fun working with all 79 slides and replacing each racy photo with fps/frag-star related pictures. I think the frag star theme ended up working well throughout the whole presentation!

Casey did a great presentation on Couch DB with the slides at the RUG! Here are the slides in their entirety, enjoy!

View on Slideshare:

Or download the pdf:

Perform Like a frAg Star Slides

Recently, a friend of mine emailed to let me know her sister-in-law was curious about Wicca and Paganism. She asked if she could send her my email so that she could ask me some questions. Since I think my response to her sister-in-law really exemplifies my honest feelings about religion, I’ve decided to make it into a blog post ~

Hi Stacey,

Good to hear from you, Huyen let me know you were having some thoughts about Wicca/Paganism and I’m glad to be able to share my own experiences with you. I read your email as well as your blog post and I feel as though we have a lot in common as far as religion goes!

I was raised in a very strict christian group, called The Way Ministry. It has since been termed a cult, and I believe it probably was although I tend to see all organized religions as large cults at this point. Like you, I never really fully accepted what I was taught, but I went through the motions and didn’t know any better. I never outwardly questioned the beliefs because they used enough fear tactics to keep us from using our own brains.

When I graduated high school and went off to college my spiritual life was thrown into flux. I was in the honors program at USM and we covered a lot of religious history, philosophy, etc. I spent a lot of time in philosophical discussions with other students that would go late into the night, sometimes into the mornings. I consider that time in my life to be the “awakening.” I was finally thinking, I was finally looking at the world, at history, at my own life in a very objective way.

I remember subscribing to agnostic ideals early on in my freshman year. And even 10 years later, after years of being a pagan I still consider my core beliefs to be agnostic. I truly believe that not I, nor anyone else can ever know the answers about heaven, hell, god, gods, goddesses, life after death, reincarnation, etc. All I can do is try and strip away all the dogma that’s been forced upon me and try and live my life in a sacred, meaningful and spiritual way. The best way for me to do that is through paganism. It just fits my personality.

I did dabble in Wicca for a couple of years, and in fact that was where I started down the pagan path. I found some local groups that held open circles and practiced with them casually; I read a lot of books, I met a lot of pagan folk. I enjoyed the energy of working with others but mostly I cherished working alone. When doing rituals or celebrating the festivals I would love to be at home, baking, preparing, cleaning my tools, burning incense, listening to pagan music. I loved casting circles in my home, doing cleansing rituals, meditations, etc. It was an incredibly magical experience. I didn’t feel anything as spiritual and powerful when working within a group. I still went to group rituals on occasion for the social aspect though and it kept me tied to the community.

The best pagan experience I ever had was a class I took in the Reclaiming tradition. Some pagan folk hosted it at their home in the Maine woods; it was a weekend class. It was two days of intensive meditation & visualization work, singing, drumming, ritual, sharing meals, etc. One morning I was awoken by the sound of a guy playing a harp and signing a beautiful welsh song. It was everything I had imagined that being a pagan would be. 

I’ve always felt that religion is just a means for control/manipulation. Wicca, of course doesn’t have the usual power scheme of most organized religions, so I think it’s a much safer sort of religion. With that being said, there are a lot people in covens that tend to be just as dogmatic and power hungry as the leaders in christian religions. 

I think that Wicca and paganism tend to draw an odd crowd. There are a lot of rebellious teens, adults with “problems” (like addictions, mental disorders, etc) and even predators. Because of the way Wicca is portrayed by the media and by people in general, a lot of weird people end up being attracted to it. Now, with that said, there are of course lots of wonderful people that are Wiccan and pagan! But you have to keep an eye out for the odd ones. Don’t be dismayed by the people that seem to be in it for all the wrong reasons. I try to remind myself that we are all on a very personal quest and I think that even the wack-jobs will find what they are looking for someday.

After practicing Wicca for a couple of years, I realized it didn’t feel right to me. I really do hate dogma. I don’t want to be told what to believe, what to call gods and goddesses, or even told that I have to believe in a god and a goddess. While I do think that there is certainly a strong force in the universe, I like to think of it is as an energy source that animates all things. I don’t think of it as masculine or feminine, but rather, genderless. Sometimes it’s nice to call it a god or a goddess just to make it easier to understand, but for the most part I never felt comfortable just replacing the christian God with a Wiccan God/Goddess.

My questioning of religion in general went far beyond christianity and right into the very core of what makes humans desire to name a god/goddess and create them in our own image. The intricate similarities between all the religions of the world make me think that each culture creates its own ideas and stories about that which they cannot explain, like death, life after death, how did we get here, why are we here, etc. And then some power hungry jerk comes along and decides to capitalize upon a peoples weakness by using their guiding set of morals and stories as a means of control.

So when all the dogma is stripped away, I am pagan. I simply celebrate the earth festivals for their significance (eostara and beltane which celebrate new life upon the fertile earth, samhain to celebrate everything the earth has given us through its harvest to sustain us, etc). I leave the gods and goddesses out of it.

Am I still spiritual? Very much so. Since I believe in energy (in the theoretical physics way), I believe that anything I put out into the universe will find its way back to me one way or another. So, I treat the earth with great respect, I try to be kind to others, I try to buy local produce to support sustainable agriculture, I teach my children about the sacredness of all life. When I walk outside at night I look up at the moon and feel comforted. I know the moon’s energy plays a vital role upon our planet, and especially upon me as a woman. I look at the sun in the morning and think of how it’s warmth creates new life on our planet and gives us energy.

And the most spiritual part of it is the underlying awareness that I know nothing. For so many years there was a religion I subscribed to that made me feel as though the most important thing was to be right, to have an answer. To be able to feel entirely comfortable with the reality that I know nothing is incredibly satisfying and fulfilling on a deep, spiritual level. It allows me to stop trying to make sense of things and connect dots. Instead, I can just live, cherish my life, and love my family without second-guessing my beliefs or chosen path.

I decided long ago that I don’t need an organized religion to give me a set of morals to live by. I believe that through the love and care of our parents when we are children and by others around us we learn to live honestly and to love truthfully. It doesn’t matter that a bible instructs someone to act in a certain way. What matters is that we are shown how to act by those that love us. And that is how I parent my two little ones. I focus my attention on love, attention, and nurturing guidance rather than fear and harsh discipline.

In summary, I think you have been brave to step out of the mold you were raised in and allow yourself to start asking the questions that you’ve probably wanted to ask for years. Wicca and paganism are incredibly self-empowering paths. There is no middle man between you and your idea of god. There is only you, your own beliefs, and a very old tradition of general ritual practices, like circle casting, calling of the four elements, etc. Both Wicca and paganism celebrate the feminine aspect of life, which is, of course, a gaping void in most organized religions.

I also want to point out that it’s easy to get caught up in buying all sorts of ritual items. It has happened to me! Remember that the purpose of the tools are to help you create a mental shift. The tools themselves don’t have any power. But us humans tend to need symbols of energy and we easily identify with the ritual tools like the athame, the wand, the chalice, etc. In the end, the tools I loved the most were the ones I made myself or found in a special way. The wand I still use is a branch that came off a willow tree in my yard. I took some time to carve it and although it doesn’t look like a fancy $100 wand, I’ve never felt as comfortable with any other wand in my hand.

Here are some resources that might be helpful to you along the way!

For the kids, Starhawk has written a children’s book “Circle Round”, songs, and is an amazing female pagan activist. She has also written a lot of great books, The Spiral Dance being my personal favorite.

Lorelei Greenwood sings beautiful pagan songs and chants.

http://www.geocities.com/firebornspirit/chants.html

(Her chants are powerful, and fun to sing in the car! We all Come from the Goddess is a good classic, as well as We Are a Circle, and Kindle a Fire)

Laura Powers also sings beautiful pagan songs!

http://www.laurapowers.com/

Scott Cunningham’s book, “Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner” is probably the best, easy to follow book for learning the basics of circle casting, your rituals tools, etc.

Witchvox.com is a great website. It is chock full of articles and there are links to your local section so you can see what sort of groups are in your area. They usually advertise their open circles on witchvox.

The Pagan Pride festivals will start happening mid-summer, so if you have some time, venture out to one near you. You’ll be able to meet lots of pagans/wiccans and there are open rituals, dancing, drumming, the works. It’s great fun!

Well I finally have something to write about. I guess it takes some porn and a solid rift in the Ruby/Rails community to jostle me out of my mommy bubble. I’ve spent the last two days reading about Matt Aimonetti’s talk at GoGaRuCo and the reactions from Ruby developers and drama queens alike and I must say I’m underwhelmed at their reactions. It’s a good mix of the typical “Oh my god I’m a girl and I’m so offended, like, didn’t feminism cure us of this?” and, “Man, I’m a guy and that shit ain’t cool. I’m offended.”

I want to whine about two terms that are trolling around: “offended” and “professional”.

First of all, I have a hard time believing any man in that audience was offended at the sight of hot chicks. They might have been caught off guard, bemused, or confused at the boldness of the speaker, but they were not offended, not even chivalrously. And I’m sure most people there had a good chuckle at Matt’s attempt at humour. 

Was it “professional?” “Professional” is one of those words that is thrown around by people in big empty suits that are afraid of lawyers, and by people that want to be wearing big empty suits and wish they were in a position to fear lawyers.

When you pack up for a weekend at a fringy Ruby event you expect to be getting comfy with a raw, fringy crowd. You expect to hack in hotel lobbies, play Werewolf in the hallways, drink lots of scotch and Bawls, check to see if there are any hot dev chicks around and eat some tasty treats.

You don’t go to a Ruby conference wearing a big black suit, carrying a briefcase. You don’t go expecting to be bored to tears by a talk on J2EE. You don’t meet for drinks after presentations with potential business partners. No. No. No. You fucking hack, talk shit, play games and eat.

So big fucking deal if Matt Aimonetti showed you some chicks in thongs to make a somewhat amusing point. YES, Matt’s slides gave me major douche chills. It was odd and I didn’t quite like it. But I was not offended, nor did I care how professional/unprofessional it was. 

Also, I’m annoyed with all this banter about how Ruby & Rails will never be taken seriously if people put porn in their presentations. If anyone cared whether or not Rails would be taken seriously we would all be boycotting RailsConf Las Vegas. Anyone who goes to that sellout of a conference has no right reaming on Aimonetti for his porn. At least in his case, “the people voted for it.” 

I definitely think Matt was misguided. Where I think he went wrong was in assuming that the audience would get something valuable out of his talk after he distracted them with hot bodies. Generally hot chicks and processing data on an intellectual level don’t really go together that well.

Using hot chicks to grab the attention of your audience is just elementary. It’s the cheap and easy way to draw an analogy and get a laugh. In this case, I can see the correlation between the images and the message he was trying to deliver, but he could have been more clever by being less transparent. The whole thing seems more like a risky high school presentation (teehee!) than a thoughtful Ruby presentation.

Besides, porn is something we watch when we are alone; when we can convince ourselves that we’re normal, as we’re watching hot, wet, slippery bodies bump each other. Porn isn’t something we like to share with other people, strangers notably. 

But seriously, porn just doesn’t belong in a Ruby presentation. A Java presentation, maybe. They need something to invigorate and distract them from their tired reality. But Rubyists are already pretty damn happy people. We don’t need our presenter to try and make us feel good. Matz already has us covered. 

Matt might have had a better chance at wowing his audience and drawing them in had he used gaming references for flavor instead of bare skin. Know your audience, Matt! Hackers are geeks! Maybe then you’d have earned some geek cred, instead of creep cred. Ouch.

I’ve done a little reworking of his slides to show you how his presentation could have gone better:

I don’t think the Ruby community needs to submit to supporting PC rhetoric. Leave that to folks that wear the suits. Matt was misguided and a bit trigger happy, but what’s really wrong with his slides is his inability to connect with developers in a meaningful and fun way. We don’t like to share sexual experiences with our peers, especially on large projector screens. We like code and video games, maybe even a good ol’ game of Fluxx. It’s not a matter of offensiveness or professionalism, it comes down to not being a douche bag.

All of this focus on a Rails Maturity Model has me wondering, what about Rails or Ruby Conservation? How do we take what has been so good about this language that we are all so passionate about and ensure that it doesn’t get side-swiped by the brooding enterprise transition? 

I went to my first Ruby User Group this evening and I’m still floating. I left thinking, “this is what the Ruby community is all about!” I feel like I’m finally getting it. This little community rocks! I get why Rubyists were outraged over RailsConf moving to Las Vegas. I get why Zed was so fucking pissed off in his ghetto rant. I get why Giles calls out Chad Fowler. I never really understood the understated awesomeness of the Ruby/Rails community until I actually sat at a user group and then had drinks with fellow Rubyists.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to sit in a .NET or a Java User Group. Do they even have those? I can picture it, though it pains me: lots of men in business suits, wielding expensive pens and dumb heavy Dell laptops. They talk in loud, booming voices, each trying to exert his own self-importance. They pretend to be interested as they listen some verbose mucky muck presentation, then they sit around in the office talking about their development environments and their enterprise software.

Tonight I sat in a room for 2 hours and I watched, I learned, I laughed. I had more fun than I’ve had in a long time. I watched an awesome guy wearings jeans and a t-shirt do a very informed presentation on state machines; he was even able to incorporate Batman into his slides! Then I saw a web designer give a whimsically animated presentation on Proce55or. And finally, a soft-spoken math guy showed us benchmark testing he wrote to compare Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.  Ruby itself affords its community a level of intimate camaraderie that many languages cannot offer. It’s natural to get excited about and attached to a language that is actually fun to use. It’s worth promoting, it’s worth preserving.

When I read that Rails was moving to Vegas it didn’t sit right with me. And I’m not even a legitimate Rails dev. Despite the organizer’s outright denial, it certainly is an omen that Rails is moving to the enterprise scene, and apparently they have no problem pairing that transition with “steaks and strippers.” And yes, realistically Ruby/Rails enterprise should make most devs happy because that ultimately means more job opportunities and probably higher salaries.

But, it’s bittersweet, because I have to wonder what the community will be like 5 years from now. Will it be this tight-knit and this organic? Will a total newb like myself receive tons of help and direction from people that I’ve never met, just because I share a passion for the same language? Will there be as much passion? Will there still be people working hard to offer fringe conferences like Ruby DCamp, and RubyFringe as alternatives to the Rails whore house that RailsConf is becoming?

It used to feel as though Ruby and Rails was led by the open community that it spawned, but now it seems that the future of Rails and Ruby lies in the hands of a scant few that appear to be empty suits.  I’m not naive enough to sit here and claim that Ruby shouldn’t go enterprise. It happens to all intrinsically good languages, in due time.

Ruby and Rails enterprising doesn’t have to be ghetto. RMM, for example is something that I think helps to setup a space for Rails in the enterprise world but at the same time declares it sacred. RMM will help improve the Ruby experience on the client side of things; anyone who has seen the horrific crimes that are committed against clients might agree that RMM might actually be a good idea. It allows a client to hold a few cards in their hand, and a balance of power isn’t a bad thing in a business transaction.

While there are people out there like Obie working to create a good space for Rails enterprise, we still need more people working to preserve the open, organic community space that attracted and kept so many of us here in the first place. 

So, thank you to the people that are working so hard to preserve the “niceness” of Ruby and Rails; like the guys that organize the user groups, plan the small local events, offer help to people on forums, contribute to open-source projects, and to people like Mike Gunderloy that invited me (despite my newbness) to work on his project in order for me to get some experience. And a big thank you to companies like Intridea and other small shops that let their Ruby developers, like my husband, work from their home offices or coffee shops. It’s all about being happy and doing things the right way. That’s what I love about Ruby, that’s what I love about Rails, and hell no I won’t be going to Vegas to witness the perversion of something beautiful.