Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

When I first heard about the Ruby on Rails workshops for women organized by Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen in San Francisco, I was jealous that they were on the opposite coast. But lo and behold — the very same event came to Boston last weekend! (Yet another reason why Boston is awesome — the academic/technical community is conducive to cool events like this.)

The event was targeted at women (though some men attended, too) who were either new to programming or new to Ruby; I volunteered as a TA to help answer students’ questions (along with a bunch of super friendly and knowledgeable people from the Boston Ruby community, which is awesome; too bad their meetups generally conflict with improv classes for me). The whole thing was awesome! I loved getting to meet/know better people in the Ruby community and meeting new people who were just getting started with Ruby. There were people from a wide variety of backgrounds there — i loved helping people get their code to do stuff! Some of the students I worked with were clearly smart enough to follow the install instructions and workshop handout on their own, but they just needed some hand-holding and moral support as a motivation to actually do it — which is why events like this are so key to getting people involved in Ruby/programming. I also loved when students got really excited about their code doing stuff — a reminder of why I got into programming in the first place, because I love the high that comes from seeing code you’ve been tweaking suddenly work.

Teacher Sarah and organizer/TA Liana both blogged about how well the event went. A lot of the students, TAs, and organizers tweeted about it too, mostly saying great things!

Unfortunately, I can’t attend the followup Open Source Code Crunch activity organized by Liana, because I’m already involved with a project at the Free Software Foundation on Wednesday nights. (Why yes, I am a huge nerd!)

For the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a particularly exciting new project: launching Parallactic Consulting — a new web design and development company in Boston and Chicago!

I teamed up with some friends and fellow U of C alums to form Parallactic; it’s awesome to get to work with this much combined talent and experience (as you can see). With both more personpower and a greater variety of skills and experience, we should be able to take on much larger projects than any of us can do as individuals. I’m pretty excited about what’s in store for this!

I’m still accepting small/mid-size projects as an individual, but for larger projects, I’m steering people toward Parallactic - spread the word!

After a meeting a couple weekends ago I found myself too tired to do much EXCEPT ride the T, so I hopped on the Orange Line and rode all the way out to the end. Sitting on the mostly-empty train, watching the city shade into suburbs and nursing the remains of a small hangover, was remarkably relaxing — an almost meditation-like escape from work and daily life.

I got off at Oak Grove and walked around, but the most exciting thing I could find within a few blocks of the T was a laundromat (I should have done some preparatory research!). I also wanted to find a bathroom, so I decided to search at the next T stop — Malden — where, much to my delight, there was a bathroom INSIDE THE STATION!! More and more T stops have this feature now — this is an awesome public service. Keep it up, MBTA!

Walking around Malden was a little more exciting than walking around Oak Grove, but by that point I wanted to transition back into getting some work done, so I didn’t spend much time there. I also declined to take the opportunity to visit Wellington, which is now the only stop on the northern branch of the Orange Line I haven’t been to yet — I’ll probably regret not going on this trip, since from the train it looks like Wellington is even more nothing-more-than-a-parking-lot than Oak Grove. Maybe some preliminary research will help me discover the secret exciting parts of the northern Orange Line?

The next day, I went with a couple folks to the historic Adams houses, adjacent to the Quincy Center T stop. For most of my childhood — well, actually, probably until as recently as a year or two ago — a guided tour of a historical person’s home seemed like the Most Boring Thing Possible. But when a friend proposed this trip, I looked forward to it all week. Maybe it’s my somewhat newfound interest in politics, or just a broadening of my interests as I get older? In any case, I enjoyed learning about the Adams family and seeing their homes — plus checking out historic Quincy!

This weekend brought me a handful of new T stops, visited both deliberately and in the course of my other adventures. I spent Friday afternoon working at a cafe in the Charles MGH area (the last new-to-me Red Line stop that’s on both lines!); its architectural feel is a pleasant mix of modern urban business district and (literally centuries-)old-school upscale rowhouses.

I’d also heard great things about “that liquor store at Charles MGH”, as friends had been describing it, so I stopped by. The store did not disappoint! They had two entire walls lined with single bottles of beer, including a lot of fancy/unusual brews. I’ve been a deficient beer geek (and hop lover!) in that I haven’t yet had a chance to try 120 Minute IPA, so I was excited to be able to pick up a bottle — though at 20% alcohol, I haven’t yet found the right time to try it.

Saturday Jesse, Sam, and I spent the afternoon on an odyssey of many-transit-typed adventures around the city. We first went to an art space in the South End to see more of this guy’s work (first encountered at Somerville Open Studios). We hit the Silver Line to uber-terminal Dudley Station for lunch — though the Silver Line isn’t a T stop for the purpose of my transit project (the Silver Line is not a train, my friends! it is merely a bus laboring under the *delusion* that it is a train!).

Post-lunch we took one of Dudley’s approximately 7234582910 buses to Roxbury, where much to our dismay The Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Center was closed. Another time! The visit was not in vain, however, since on our way to the Stonybrook Orange Line stop (in a pretty neat place, across from a cutely-landscaped park), we accidentally walked by the Sam Adams brewery and accidentally got free beer (they were asking visitors to vote between two samples of beer, only one of which can make it into next year’s officially-marketed lineup). Nom nom nom!

Since our evening plans were in Somerville (and since this was a stop I hadn’t yet visited), we rode the Orange Line all the way across town to Sullivan Square. Like Dudley, Sullivan is a mega-transfer point, where many bus lines have their termini; unlike Dudley, Sullivan, as far as we could tell, offers absolutely no motive for visiting other than transferring to a bus. So, that’s what we did!

I furthered my plan of visiting new T stops this weekend — we went to the open studios at the Distillery in South Boston by way of the Andrew T Stop. The Distillery was about a mile from the T stop, so we got to explore South Boston on our walk, which was pretty interesting and cool (though not literally cool — Boston’s 3 weeks of nice spring/summer weather seem to be over, and it’s oppressively hot and humid). Southie wasn’t quite what I’d expected — with colorful, close-together houses on hills, some streets looked surprisingly San Francisco-esque, but the Irish pub we stopped into definitely didn’t (its decor tended more toward Irish nationalist propaganda).

Later, after walking downtown post-studios, we also hit up the New England Medical Center T Stop to get home — I hadn’t realized that the FAO Schwartz Bear had a new home!

This was the smallest of the three open studios I’ve seen in the past year, and the artists skewed the youngest — one friend commented that it seemed like college art, which I agreed with. In contrast, the Fort Point studios from last fall were full of mostly professional artists, and the Somerville studios from earlier this spring seemed to have a lot of adult amateurs (a demographic that I think produces a lot of interesting work!).

One of the things that I like the most about living where we do is that we’re within walking distance of so many urban and suburban “biomes” — different population levels and feels, from dense forest to downtown skyscrapers.

Our apartment is in a neighborhood that’s reminiscent of suburban residential areas (though the houses are closer together). When I go running, I can go to the commercial-suburban-feeling strip malls and highways near Alewife and feel like I’m in the sprawling exurbs. Or I can go to almost the opposite extreme, the parks surrounding Fresh Pond, where I can be surrounded by trees and water and out of view of human-made structures. The Cambridge and Somerville squares have almost a small-town downtown feel. Stretching “walking distance” to a few miles, Allston is a bustling urban neighborhood. And then there’s the financial district, full-scale city.

Everywhere else I’ve lived, and most places I could live, have a much more homogenous five-mile radius around them — but variety is just one of many perks of living in the Boston area.

It’s not a T stop, but today I went with a group for a local Boston adventure — we took a ferry to Spectacle Island, in the harbor, for a picnic. It was a beautiful day, albeit a little windy, and our picnic, hiking, and beach football-throwing were fun. I was a little disappointed that the island seemed so landscaped (it had wide paths, and few if any trees), since I’d always thought of the Harbor Islands as a crazy wilderness — but what do I expect from an island mostly made of landfill. It’s also apparently one of the highest points in the harbor — we saw a nice view when we climbed the south drumlin.

When I first moved to Boston I decided that before I move away I want to visit every train station on the T — my rules are that I have to get on or off the T at the station as well as explore the immediate surrounding area.

This week I made my first deliberate visit to a T stop I hadn’t been to, though in a somewhat anticlimactic way — Alewife is one of the closest T stops to my apartment, just in terms of distance, but I’d never taken the T there because there’s no bus from my house to there and biking to Harvard (which is close to the same distance) is usually a lot faster overall given the extra time I’d spend on the T.

On Friday, I decided to get to Harvard by biking to Alewife and taking the T from there. Alewife is the last stop on the red line and boasts a large parking garage where commuters from the northwest suburbs leave their cars while taking the train into the city; I was pleasantly surprised to note that they also have huge bike racks, which were totally full in the middle of the day. I took the T back around rush hour, and watched a lot of people get out to go to their cars and bikes — the people in cars probably live in places like Arlington or Lexington, but since Alewife is kind of in the middle of nowhere I’m curious where all those bikers come from.

One of the things I like most about living in the Boston area is how much easier it is to get from place to place than in other places I’ve lived. The city is pretty walkable in general, and most of the time, I can choose between five different methods of travel (walk, bike, drive, public transit, taxi), depending on the circumstances. Circumstances usually also dictate that one or more of those methods is totally stupid — the weather is too nasty to walk, or I’ve left my bike somewhere, or I’m planning on drinking, or the bus doesn’t go there, or a taxi is too expensive — but given the plethora of options there’s usually a good one that’s obvious. Sometimes, however, circumstances collaborate to make my transportation choices much more obscure…

I’m currently hanging out near the Davis T stop, which is also about a 20 minute walk from my house. In a couple hours I am heading to somewhere else which is also accessible by T. My house is a 10-minute bus ride from the T (but the bus only runs every half hour).

I’ve also left my bike near the Harvard T stop with an underinflated tire; Harvard is a short T ride from Davis and a 20 minute walk/10 minute bike ride/10 minute bus ride (but the bus only runs every half hour) from my house, and I have a bike pump at my house.

PROBLEM: What is the optimal way to get from point A to point B, given that I also want to drop some stuff off/get some stuff at my house before arriving at point B? You may use scratch paper.

Tomorrow early in the morning I’m coming back to Davis. I’d hoped to get may bike back home by then so I could bike here, but that’s seeming pretty unreasonable by now — so I’ll probably take the bus to Harvard (which is of course in the opposite direction from my destination), and then take the T to Davis. And that’s why the MBTA should start bus service from West Cambridge to Davis.

Today I went with a handful of friends to the Somerville Open Studios; we went to the Fort Point ones last fall. In both cases, we got to meet and talk to artists while looking at their work and workspace (which is also usually their home), but in Fort Point, most of the studios were subsidized spaces in dedicated artists’ collective buildings, while in Somerville, a lot of the artspaces were run out of people’s apartments or garages, and there seemed to be a lot more side project work from people who aren’t necessarily professionals. This was pretty neat! I felt like in addition to seeing art, we were seeing a lot of the Somerville community (and Somerville geography — I’m still tired from walking all afternoon around parts of the city I didn’t know existed) of ordinary artistic people. Jesse said at one point that he thought the anthropological aspects of going into these people’s homes and workspaces was almost more interesting than the art.

Of course, the art was interesting too. There were a lot of cool things, but a few favorites: a Moomers-esque apartment where we chatted with the guy who makes crazy robot sculptures from repurposed metal, and a couple of guys in a garage, one of whom paints realistic images of suburban scenes, and the other of whom paints surrealistic images of an astronaut moving in a world that’s a cross between the familiar and the futuristic, exploring our relationships to prior generations’ notion of the future (more at his website, astronautdinosaur.com(!!)).

I’d never heard of open studios before last fall, but it seems like a pretty sweet idea. People from the community can see what is going on in the local art scene and learn more about the art process through talking to artists and seeing their workspaces; artists can get exposure, show off their stuff, connect with each other, and sell pieces.