Anja is an artist. Truly. Who else could make something as beautiful as this?

Even if it made her whole system do this:

She killed it of course (she’s actually quite violent), but not before Carla made her save it to print out and stick to her fridge.

It’s just three more days until we fly to Kiev to attend Rubyshift where we’ll be giving a short presentation about our summer of code. To help us prepare we visited Juliane Peterson for some advice on how to give a good presentation.

Julieane has been helping out all the Berlin-based RGSoC students with their presentations. She’s an expert in the science of public speaking (as well as being a linguist and teacher). Amongst the many, many excellent pointers she had the ones we really liked were about posture and how to stand:

• your feet should be shoulder distance apart
• bend the knees a little bit
• relax your shoulders
• lean the whole body forward

Lean forward? Yes. Because the audience is your enemy! If you lean forward it sends a psychological signal to the audience that you aren’t scared, and won’t be running away. It projects confidence and presence, which will capture their attention.

Other tips for keeping the audience captivated are:

• talk in short sentences
• repetition, repetition, repetition
• pause a little bit between points (especially hard for Anja)
• funny pictures are always good

It was great to talk to her. We went into the session shy and nervous, and came out happy and confident. Many many (many) thanks!

Valid question!

Here’s our favourite @Soundcloud song of the summer, soon to be part of the @RailsGirlsSoC Soundcloud MixTape:

Some more regular expression. And what for? To make BIG numbers more readable. For Example instead of 1234567 Euro we want to have 1’234’567 Euro. Wayyy better. So let’s write a helper method with a regex! Thanks to Arne we got it finally working:

def format_large_number(number)
    number.to_s.gsub(/\D/, '').reverse.gsub(/.{3}/, '\0\'').reverse.gsub(/^\'/, '')
end

The method takes the number and:

• substitutes everything that’s not a number with nothing
• reverses the number (7654321)
• takes that and puts a ‘ every third position (765’432’1)
• and reverses it again (1’234’567)
• and in case we have a ‘ in the beginning, it substitutes it with nothing so we don’t get a ‘123’456

Piepe einfach (which translates as: easy peasy)

(Arne: In case I bungled the explanation, please contact me!)