Sara Jackson on Teaching in Kanazawa (RubyConf 2023‪)‬ Software Sessions

Sara is a team lead at thoughtbot.

She talks about her experience as a professor at Kanazawa Technical College, giant LAN parties in Rochester, transitioning from Java to Ruby, shining a light on maintainers, and her closing thoughts on RubyConf.

Recorded at RubyConf 2023 in San Diego.

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A few topics covered:

Being an Assistant Arofessor in Kanazawa
Teaching naming, formatting, and style
Differences between students in Japan vs US
Technical terms and programming resources in Japanese
LAN parties at Rochester
Transitioning from Java to Ruby
Consulting
The forgotten maintainer
RubyConf

Other links

Sara's mastodon
thoughtbot
This Week in Open Source
testdouble
Ruby Central Scholars and Guides Program
City Museum

Japan

International College of Technology Kanazawa
RubyKaigi
Applying mruby to World-first Small SAR Satellite (Japanese lightning talk) (mruby in space)

Rochester

Rochester Institute of Technology
Electronic Gaming Society
Tora-con
Strong National Museum of Play

Transcript
You can help correct transcripts on GitHub.

[00:00:00] Jeremy: I'm here at RubyConf, San Diego, with Sara Jackson, thank you for joining me today.

[00:00:05] Sara: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

[00:00:07] Jeremy: Sara right now you're working at, ThoughtBot, as a, as a Ruby developer, is that right?

[00:00:12] Sara: Yes, that is correct.

Teaching in Japan
[00:00:14] Jeremy: But I think before we kind of talk about that, I mean, we're at a Ruby conference, but something that I, I saw, on your LinkedIn that I thought was really interesting was that you were teaching, I think, programming in. Kanazawa, for a couple years.

[00:00:26] Sara: Yeah, that's right. So for those that don't know, Kanazawa is a city on the west coast of Japan. If you draw kind of a horizontal line across Japan from Tokyo, it's, it's pretty much right there on the west coast. I was an associate professor in the Global Information and Management major, which is basically computer science or software development. (laughs) Yep.

[00:00:55] Jeremy: Couldn't tell from the title.

[00:00:56] Sara: You couldn't. No.. so there I was teaching classes for a bunch of different languages and concepts from Java to Python to Unix and Bash scripting, just kind of all over.

[00:01:16] Jeremy: And did you plan the curriculum yourself, or did they have anything for you?

[00:01:21] Sara: It depended on the class that I was teaching. So some of them, I was the head teacher. In that case, I would be planning the class myself, the... lectures the assignments and grading them, et cetera. if I was assisting on a class, then usually it would, I would be doing grading and then helping in the class. Most of the classes were, uh, started with a lecture and then.

Followed up with a lab immediately after, in person.

[00:01:54] Jeremy: And I think you went to, is it University of Rochester?

[00:01:58] Sara: Uh, close. Uh, Rochester Institute of Technology. So, same city. Yeah.

[00:02:03] Jeremy: And so, you were studying computer science there, is that right?

[00:02:07] Sara: I, I studied computer science there, but I got a minor in Japanese language. and that's how, that's kind of my origin story of then teaching in Kanazawa. Because Rochester is actually the sister city with Kanazawa. And RIT has a study abroad program for Japanese learning students to go study at KIT, Kanazawa Institute of Technology, in Kanazawa, do a six week kind of immersive program.

And KIT just so happens to be under the same board as the school that I went to teach at.

[00:02:46] Jeremy: it's great that you can make that connection and get that opportunity, yeah.

[00:02:49] Sara: Absolutely. Networking!

[00:02:52] Jeremy: And so, like, as a student in Rochester, you got to see how, I suppose, computer science education was there. How did that compare when you went over to Kanazawa?

[00:03:02] Sara: I had a lot of freedom with my curriculum, so I was able to actually lean on some of the thin