Sara Chipps

Medium Posts

Hi, lately I’ve been doing all my posts on Medium. I love the editor, I love the format and the platform. It doesn’t make for the best blog, but I’m dealing with it.
Some of my favorite posts so far are:
This first post about Jewelbots
This post about embracing kids for who they are
this post about awesome Dads
and this post about recruiting
I’ll probably continue to to post mostly there, you can check out my latest here.

Posted on September 9, 2015 with 2 notes ()
Less Conf more Love

In October and November of 2013 I spoke at five JavaScript conferences in five countries. It was such an honor to be asked by amazing organizers to speak in their countries, I was so excited for the tour of a lifetime.

By the third country I was tired and missed home. By the fifth country I was exhausted. I was a bad speaker and a poor guest. I didn’t get to learn about the local user groups and people because I just went right to bed after each event. Sometimes I didn’t stay for the whole event.

I wouldn’t trade any of the experiences for anything. I just regret not being a better community servant.

This year I’m committed to not committing. I’m only doing a small handful of speaking. This will give me time to focus on meeting people and seeing awesome places while being present. Also, Jewliebots is a big commitment, I want to put my all into it.

I’ll be sharing more on Twitter about some awesome places I’ll be headed.

Posted on February 12, 2015 with 5 notes ()
The Best Hardware Videos on the Internet

I compiled this list for a talk in Chattanooga recently, and wanted to share with the rest of you the best videos on hardware/nodebots/other things on the web.

Halt and Catch Fire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGAcqdTxBUY

Remote control cats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NYyGC-wZKU

Dorby

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh7LtDA6EL0

Blinking Lights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws7svZuq29c

Nodebots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaZSFUeoj6o

Blinking lights

http://instagram.com/p/cFVNtmJxlc/

Christmas Sweater

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e33VV6XPqlc

Heatsync Labs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuxFFcRuI8

Node Copter Bollero

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymlbNEL5TQQ

Node Copter Swarm

https://wxww.youtube.com/watch?v=hhpsaITWMoY

Node Copter Gangnam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oWdOhVAHgM

Node Rockets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl9Y1avMRV8

Node Boats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3MAQk-ttPE

Meet the Boats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKqwo-jvRYo

Spark Core

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sparkdevices/spark-core-wi-fi-for-everything-arduino-compatible

Spark Home

https://www.spark.io/

Super Awesome Sylvia

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#q=sylvia+super+awesome+boing+boing&tbm=vid

Amplitie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDMaXGYxhFA

Instructables

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k12h_FOInZg

Adafruit Sneakers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjhTbfaHda0

Jewliebots

http://vimeo.com/96708475

Posted on September 11, 2014 with 5 notes ()
Welcome Corinne Warnshuis, the first ED of Girl Develop It!

Four years ago next month Vanessa Hurst and I started Girl Develop It as a class at a coworking space about HTML/CSS. We never anticipated that it would grow to nearly 30 cities, and effect so many lives.

Now it is a living, breathing organization run by the Girl Develop It chapter leaders. Earlier this year it became obvious that this was becoming a full time job, which is why Corinne Warnshuis has been named as the first Executive Director of Girl Develop It!

The Philadelphia chapter of Girl Develop It has always been a part of the organization that has excelled in everything initiative that it has started.

You can read more about her new role here at the Technically Philly blog, as well as reactions from the board and her goals as well as a preview of her plans.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Corinne, and I’m really excited to watch her grow the organization.

Posted on June 26, 2014 with 1 note ()
NYTimes, and a quick note

I think that NY Times piece that came out today about the current climate in technology for women is very important, and pretty well written. I’m glad that the issue is being highlighted, and we’re talking about women’s issues outside of Hacker News.

Publicity is fleeting, and I’m sure we’ll all forget in a few weeks. However, I want to quickly clarify something that disappointed me a bit.

What I said was this: Everyone I know has had an amazing experience in the community. Many people I know have experienced horrible things, and I would never want to diminish that. It is especially hard, because those people all love this community very much, and when they are marginalized or harassed it really taints the whole experience.

The quote I got was this:

I really appreciate the Times covering this issue, I’m also honored that they thought of me at all. I’m not happy about how the article paints me on the other side of an issue I care very much about.

Lastly, and least importantly, I got my hair did for the picture. Rest assured that it will still make it on my mother’s fridge.

UPDATE: Yesterday I got a lovely email from Claire Cain Miller saying she regretted not being able to include more of the conversation and that it bothered her that I was disappointed. Wanted to make sure to include that in my blog post.

Posted on April 6, 2014 with 17 notes ()
My Role as CTO of Flatiron School and Flatiron Labs

I’m a homeschool kid. My mother, an elementary school teacher, decided to teach me at home when I had trouble keeping up with the other kids when it came to doing homework, and paying attention in class (a skill I’ve still yet to master).

My mother taught myself, and my brother Christopher at home. In the mornings we would have school, in the afternoons we would play outside, mostly with dirt and bugs. There were lots of backyard trees I was to climb, and armies of rolly pollys to command. I’ll always treasure the fact that I got to spend the majority of my childhood running around with him.

Our curriculum was optimized for self teaching. We would read a lesson first, and then do exercises at our own pace. Read, do, read, do. We spent a lot of time at the library, and some time being socially awkward with the rest of the weird homeschool kids at the homeschool group my mother started (which she claims to be the provenance behind my “entrepreneurial attitude”).

When I was approaching High School I asked my parents to let me go to school. I felt I was missing out on a lot of possible friendships and experiences. They said yes after a lot of pleading. I thought I was opening myself up to a whole world of exploration, what I experienced was a dumbed down primer for a short stint as a student. Classes taught by the miserable masses of tenured teachers being dominated by a system that squashed creativity and passion.

I was terrible at school because it was so unnecessary, I was and am easily exhausted by bureaucracy and rote exercise. I was an always have been on a lifetime quest for education in all forms. Public education did little but attempt to thwart that quest.

Flatiron School

It’s this drive to disrupt sub standard educational systems that led me to cofound Girl Develop It, and it was this drive that led me to accept the role of CTO of Flatiron School. It’s super exciting to be a part of an emerging form of education, that is purpose driven with immediate and tangible results.

Flatiron School, for those of you who don’t know, is an immersive coding program based in Manhattan. We offer classes in Ruby on Rails and iOS.

Our students are encouraged to be lifelong learners and contributors to the software development ecosystem. From my experience thus far, I’ve been astounded by the capability and drive of students graduating our classes.

Flatiron School’s record for graduating great developers speaks for itself. It has placed 98% of its grads in full time jobs as software developers. They have given over 75k in scholarships to women, many Girl Develop It grads, which is something they have never publicized (and still haven’t).

We have a “no student left behind” mindset, with over 98% of our students making it from matriculation to graduation.

At Flatiron I will be managing our internal software, and I will also be leading the charge behind Flatiron Labs.

Flatiron Labs

For the past few weeks I’ve been working with founders (and friends) Avi Flombaum and Adam Enbar on starting, staffing, and ramping up Flatiron Labs.

Flatiron Labs is a development shop that will focus on building quality applications for clients and leveling up our students by pairing them with senior developers and exposing them to the full product lifecycle.

I’m very excited to already be working on amazing projects with incredible people and clients. Watching the gears click into place when an apprentice is problem solving with a pro is unlike anything else. The energy in a place focused on learning and growing is incredibly contagious.

Our apprentices work side-by-side with senior mentors who coach them through our iterative process. Our QA team is top notch, and nothing leaves our hands without their through examination for test coverage and usability.

This is an especially awesome opportunity for me as I have always wanted the chance to help create a team with diverse backgrounds and demonstrate the mantra I have been chanting for so long: diversity begets quality and more imaginative products.

At Flatiron Labs we also encourage our clients to hire their whole team out from under us, senior developers included. It’s a great way to test our developers and to ramp up quickly.

Do you have a project that you’d like to see come to fruition for web, mobile, or any other medium? You can reach out to sara@flatironlabs.com.

Do you want to dedicate every day to making others better at what they dream of doing? We’d love to have you, and we’re hiring, sara@flatironlabs.com.

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Tagged: job school

Posted on March 18, 2014 with 6 notes ()
Recruiting: There is no such thing as a developer shortage

I talk to founders, CTOs, CEOs and hiring managers of startups often. I host and go to quite a few social events monthly that they gather at, besides them being a large part of my friend group. While they are all amazingly brilliant and I gather much wisdom by osmosis; one thing I hear quite often from all of them what a difficult time they have finding and hiring developers. I end up saying the following to them, and I thought it was a good thing to share with everyone. Hiring developers doesn’t have to be hard. While they are in demand, good employers are increasingly rare, and if you genuinely care about finding your developers and keeping them happy it will be easy to set yourself apart.

A lot of the points of this post originate from the book Smart and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky. If you can, just read that book. It’s full of wisdom about hiring that is much more than “how to get a developer to work for you”. I hope to cover some of those topics myself, but in all honesty you should just read that book. In case you don’t, however, you can start with this post.

THEY ARE NOT GOING TO COME TO YOU

I have posted several job posts when hiring developers, I have never hired a developer through a job post. The developers you want to hire are never applying to job listings. The are either gainfully employed, or directly contacting you because they have found your company and love what you do. This field is so saturated right now that the good developers can pick and choose the companies they want to work for.

So, how do you find them? Resumes are meaningless. If you gave me a pile of resumes, and told me I had to hire one of the developers in the pile, the first thing I would do is schedule a party and invite all the developers on that list. This is what you need to do. Either go places where there are many developers and meet them, or create your own event and invite developers. That doesn’t mean doing a speaking series, either; ideally you can be more creative than to sit butts in seats and have someone talk about caching. At Levo League we had (and we still have) the developer potluck, which was a monthly event where we all drank wine, ate each other’s food, and discussed thigns that were important to us. Find a way to promote developer fellowship and then they will come. You can also go to them. Meetup.com has a plethora of events you can go to. I recommend targeting hack nights and other situations where, rather than sitting in an audience listening, you are chatting and getting to know each other.

Don’t be turned off if a developer that you want to hire already has a job. Chances are their company will not be focused on the points below and they are not 100% happy. Keeping your developers happy is the job of every good manager. If they aren’t happy they aren’t working with the right people. If they are happy keep in touch, chances are they may be looking for something in a while given the short tenure of this industry and the volatility of most companies. (read: I will straight up gank one of your developers, watch out).

CARE ABOUT WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO THEM

Often I have heard people say things like “this job would make any developer a huge deal in X industry”. Developers don’t want to be huge in the fashion or artisan food industry, generally they’d rather be huge in the developer industry, and your app that is the foursquare of trunk clubs is not going to get them there.

Developers like solving problems, they are basically technical detectives. What is the interesting problem that developers get to solve with your company? This can be hard if you’re not a dev yourself, so, in that case, think about what’s unique for a developer at your company. Will they be building a team? Will they have a high salary comparatively to other developers? Will they have the chance to work with brilliant people? Will they be working out of an amazing space?

Moreso, find out what is important to them besides coding and perks. Do they have a family? Find a way for them to bring their kids in a few times a week, or have a family meal on Fridays. Do they like to travel? Invent a travel bonus, where they get to go where they want one week every three months. Do they want to speak at conferences? Become their agent, allow them time to commit to open source.

Actually care about these things and don’t pretend. Your developers will be working with you more than they do anything else in life, more than they sleep, more than they are with their kids, it’s your job to ensure they are brilliantly happy doing it.

HAVE CLEAR INCENTIVES

If your developers work for 70 hours a week, if they don’t have a say in product, if they have to be in at 8am, if they have to wear a suit, or any other arbitrary thing that doesn’t matter in the end: you’re going to end up with a bad team.

Why a bad team? Developers are getting the full court press every day, what they do is valuable. If they have to pick a company that forces them to be uncomfortable it means other companies aren’t hiring them.

Stupid perks like a keg and a ping pong table don’t make up for making them follow rote ritual. It’s time to give up your dad’s version of how business is done, and recognize that this is just a different culture.

KNOW HOW THE DOUGHNUTS ARE MADE

Here is something that boggles my mind, I don’t know how it’s possible that so many people with web startups have no idea how the internet works? If I were to open a shoe factory, I would learn all about making shoes. I would make a few shoes of my own. I would make sure that I knew everything that goes into making a shoe. Especially if I need to hire shoemakers, how else would I know if they are any good?

Developers can smell a non-technical founder from miles away. It tells them that you have zero respect for what they do, and you think they are just tools. The Twitter book by Nick Bilton mentioned few developers. Somehow that company was built with a few developers. Your developers don’t want that to happen to them, and if you don’t care enough about what your company produces to learn how it works that’s the message you’re sending.

INVEST EARLY

Show them that they are important to you. Offer them what they are worth, don’t negotiate to death. Sure, if you haggle you can pay them 10k less, but guess what, tomorrow they are going to get an offer fro 20k more and they will remember the hard line you drew.

Take them to nice dinners, or, spend a whole afternoon with them doing something they enjoy. Walk in the park, go to a movie, meet their spouse, take the spouse with you. Show them that they, and the people that are important to them are important to you.

The $200 you save now from avoiding all this wont be worth the 10k you lose because you ended up with a terrible developer.

I NEVER SAID THIS WAS EASY

If you are at this point and thinking “wow, all this is too much” then you are in the wrong line of work. Coding is a skill that is maybe the most in demand in the world, it’s unreasonable to think it’s not going to take some sacrifices to attract the people that are talented.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line.

Tagged: recruiting developers teams

Posted on February 6, 2014 with 39 notes ()
2013 or What have I been up to?

I’m starting this post on the last day of 2013, a few hours before I will be celebrating with some of the people that have made this year such a milestone one. I hardly know where to start with this post, so I’m just going to type and let it take me where it will.

There isn’t one event that defines this year, there were many. I’m going to try my best to give you a peek into the last 365 of my life.

LEVO LEAGUE

I imagine I will always consider being CTO of Levo League a role that changed me as a human being in many incredible ways. It’s been a few months since I left there, I think that you always need a few months to be able to look back and really understand an experience entirely. A few years will give you perspective on just how much it changed your life but a few months gives you the a look into how it enriched you as a person.

I’ve often said that my fatal flaw is the inability to work on things that I don’t believe in. In Caroline Ghosn and Amanda Pouchot (founders of Levo League) I found women that were leading the charge towards something I believe in 100%, the advancement of women in the workplace. It was an amazing privilege to learn from their leadership for as long as I did.

When I started working with Levo League at the end of 2011 I barely knew the team, what I knew from them I liked, but they were just another client. I shortly came to believe that Caroline was one of the most effective and insightful CEOs I had ever had the privilege to run across. When I was approached to start their development team I was honored at the opportunity.

Caroline and Amanda gave me carte blanche to hire the team that I believed would bring Levo League’s web application to reality, and that’s the task that took up most of my 2012. In the beginning of 2013 we were a team of 10 engineers, designers, and a product lead. I have never been so privileged as to work with that amazing group. We built a culture based in TDD, pairing, and the ability to learn from each other. I still wonder at the things we accomplished together, they are now my dearest friends, a leader couldn’t ask for a better conclusion to her stay. Some of the team is still at Levo League, others have moved on to amazing companies like Mozilla, and Thoughtbot. I’m crazy proud of how far we’ve all come together.

GIRL DEVELOP IT

In September of this year I had to make on of the hardest decisions of my life when it became too much to manage the Levo League development team, and manage the growth of Girl Develop It. For those of you who don’t know, Girl Develop It is an organization I started in 2010 with my friend Vanessa Hurst that teaches low cost classes for adult women how to code. Half way through this year GDI hit its 5,000th unique student, and added its 16th city chapter.

Girl Develop It was on the cusp of getting its 501c3 status as a non-profit. It needed a board, and someone to do the rounds of fundraising. It was time to leave Levo League, and empower an amazing team to continue on without me. The development team at Levo is still going strong, and, they are hiring! If you are interested feel free to reach out to me directly for an introduction.

Starting in September I worked with our board member Erynn Petersen to get our board together. Girl Develop It is now a 501c3, and it is supported by board members Erynn Petersen (Outercurve), Alanna Gombert (Conde Nast), and Marc Hedlund (Stripe).

The direction we have taken with leadership is to put it into the hands of the chapter leaders. This has been done in the form of working teams. At first it was a little crazy getting everyone accustomed to the idea of putting some beuacracy behind decision making. However, now the teams are humming along and have proven to be a great way to make sure all voices are being heard. Any time forward action needs to be taken a chapter leader steps forward and starts a working group and whomever wants to join and be a part of that decision can do so.

It’s been amazing to step back and watch as the people that run our classes and speak with our students take action to grow and sustain GDI. It’s been 3 years since we got started, and I’m super excited to see where things head.

Girl Develop It could use your support as it continues to grow. You can donate here. If you would like to donate an amount not listed on the form reach out to accounts@girldevelopit.com for details.

TRAVELING THE WORLD

In October I started the Sara Chipps world tour of 2013 and traveled the globe. I was honored this year to be asked to speak at great conferences like LXJS, JSConf.eu, Robotsconf, The Great British Node conf and more.

I wanted to spend all that time meditating to find out what I wanted to do in the future. I’ve been very busy for the past few years, and I thought I could get some insight while traveling. I made lots of friends, I had lots of great conversations, and I saw many amazing things, but I was no closer to my next step when it was over than when I started. A great lesson I learned is that you really can’t force yourself to gain insight.

When I got back I focused all my energy on getting in line with my future. A wise friend told me that if I put myself in a lot of serendipitous situations an answer was bound to come to me. I had a lot coffee with friends and associates. I did a Google Hangout with someone new almost every day. I supported my friends in their endeavors, I worked on a book, and I had the great privilege to spend quality time with my family.

CONCLUSION

I’m not yet ready to talk about my next step publicly, in the meantime I’ve been hacking on lots of hardware in the vein of wearables. I have learned so much in the past year that I thought it was time to share via my blog. I will continue to do so during the next few weeks.

I really appreciate all the support I’ve gotten from family and friends, those online and in person. I love this world of software development and everyone in it. I look forward to continuing along the path and keeping you posted.

Tagged: conference software update girl develop it levo

Posted on January 3, 2014 with 6 notes ()
Getting Started with Nodebots

Nodebots! The JavaScript of the future!

A few people have asked me how to get started in this world of JavaScript and Arduino. I put together the following hack for my talk at JSConf.eu. It’s a lightup GitHub build success indicator I called Buildbrite.

The parts you will need to order before getting started are an Arduino board, a tri-color LED, an A/B to USB cable, and a wire or wires and a breadboard.

Let me know if you have any questions, instructions are in the README of the GitHub repo!

You can also watch the video from JSConf.eu here!

Tagged: nodebots aduino javascript

Posted on October 22, 2013 with 4 notes ()
What we can learn from @CoryBooker about product

“Your website is broken.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, what are you experiencing?”

“It doesn’t work.”

“That’s terrible, where are you seeing an error?”

“There’s no error, just when I hit the button to login nothing happens.”

“Oh no! Let’s take a look at what’s going on, do you see any red text at the top of the page?”

“What? Oh, yes, it says my password is wrong. Ohhh, I remember, sorry, never mind.”

Serious developers would rather be doing ANYTHING IN THE WORLD but having conversations like this. It’s times like this that make you really resent users. We are trying to INNOVATE, stop bothering us with your dumb questions. It’s not our fault you’re bad at the internet.

I am a Jersey girl, so I may be a little biased, however, Cory Booker is the best politician since 2007 Obama. I’ve been following him for years, his passion about making Newark a better place is awe inspiring. His use of social media to literally save puppies and fight fires with his bare hands on the streets of Newark is the stuff of legends.

(The 1st three suggested CB searches may or may not be ranked that high because of me)

Something that’s always blown my mind about him is how he answers seemingly every Tweet about things that, obviously, are waaay too unimportant for him to care about.

I read these and I’m like “He’s the Mayor! He’s changing the world? What the heck does he care about your damn pothole! Call someone whose job it is to do this!"

Yet, every time he has a patient answer, and every time a good citizen is able to confirm that his mayor is watching out for him, and deeply cares about his city.

Isn’t this the exact relationship we want to have with our users? Don’t we want them to feel like we are watching out for them, and we are here whenever they need us? Don’t we want them to feel secure that this is an application that will not disappear one day, and will be a valuable tool they can always count on? We want them to know that they are our priority, and we want to serve their needs.

This sometimes means taking some time to answer questions that are below your pay grade. In the best cases this allows you to learn a lot about your application and how your users see it. There is much to learn about the conversation above. What you can walk away with is, "This user has difficulty seeing the error, this may mean the error isn’t large enough or in the right place.” If more users experience the same issue, you have your answer.

We can all take a lesson from how patient Cory Booker is with the citizens of Newark. Next time a user asks you a “stupid question” take a breath, and consider that you are the guardian of your software. A citizen is in trouble! It’s your job to save them.

Tagged: software product cory booker

Posted on July 31, 2013 with 3 notes ()

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