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

After years of making social networking sites for other people, I’ve finally launched one of my own! Stemming.org is a networking/community site and collaborative blog for girls and women interested in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). I’m super excited about this — I think it has a lot of potential to support and connect women and girls who are often minorities in their fields or discouraged in their interests.

So far, I’ve done all the design and development (in Rails) for the site — it’s been cool to be my own client and get a chance to explore some technical things I might not otherwise have learned. (And being my own client gives me added appreciation for my clients’ perspective when we’re working on other projects like this!)

Stemming welcomes blog posts from anyone who has something to say that would be of interest to women and girls in STEM; I’d also love for people to share the link and send me their suggestions/improvements!

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!)

Through Parallactic, I was commissioned to work on a Ruby project with the Facebook Data Store. As far as I could find, there wasn’t already a client in Ruby for this (the official Facebook-provided client is in PHP, and the useful Facebook Ruby client facebooker hasn’t added support for the Data Store), so I wrote one!

This is the first (but hopefully not the last!) piece of potentially-useful code that I’m publishing under an open-source/free software license, so I’m pretty psyched. You can download the code on GitHub! It’s licensed under the MIT license — which means you can do pretty much whatever you want with it — and it doesn’t require Rails.

Enjoy! And drop me a line if you find it useful :).

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!

What I’ve been working on lately:

• Launched the new site for Templeman Automation. I created a custom design for this product development company and implemented the design with a custom version of WordPress so that Templeman can easily add new product or project pages and display news blurbs and a featured product on the front page. I integrated Google Checkout with the site to give users an easy way to purchase Templeman’s products. I also got to learn sIFR for this project, which was lots of fun to work with — all the headlines in the site are automatically transformed into a custom font.
• Added some new features to the Fly Over The City bike messenger dispatch site — the client wanted a holding area for jobs to be deleted and a label printing function for clients.
• Made some tweaks to Flathound, a real estate search site written in Ruby on Rails; the coolest part of this project was adding an edit-in-place feature for administrators, so a user can just click on a field in a list of apartments and immediately get an edit box without having to go to a separate page.
• Added some new features to Espressy; in addition to listing several countries they identify with, users can now add specific details about their relationships to those countries and share thoughts, memories, and recommendations.

I’ve also been doing some design work and some more Ruby on Rails coding for projects that are yet to be launched — and another interesting project that I’ll post about soon!

Some website projects I’ve been working on in the past couple months:

• Launching the design for MetaArts, an educational publishing development house in Chicago
• Launching MyWomanToday, which I worked on through Webstudio Boston — I did all the backend Ruby coding for this social network
• HTML coding for Really Useful Information
• Some updates and changes to Lamp Glass’s online store
• Wordpress customization for Tall Tales from the Antiques Trail — it’s still under development, but this will be a blog where a local antique dealer collects colorful stories (from his own experience as well as from colleagues) about the business

I’ve also been enhancing my Wordpress skills and learning sIFR for some other projects that are still in the behind-the-scenes stages. One of the great things about being a freelancer is getting to learn new technological skills with almost every project!

My first Ruby on Rails powered site went live recently — check out myabuy.com, a site that connects vendors and consumers via categorized product descriptions and personalized RSS feeds.

Also, I’ve just launched the redesign of daccordboutique.com — it’s the business site of a French-themed gift shop in my hometown of Shepherdstown, WV.

Anyone developing any kind of web app with Rails should definitely pick up a copy of Rails Recipes. Even for a relatively simple app, I consistently find myself saying “I wonder if that book has anything I can adapt to do this task” and then it has, not something I can adapt, but something that is exactly right for the task at hand.

It’s really a lot like Rails in general — once you’re working in it, it’s so obvious that of course not every developer should have to reinvent the wheel for every part of an application when nearly every web app has these same parts. I’m a little bothered, though, that it seems so innovative — duh, there should be a framework that makes it easy to develop the stuff that everyone is developing, and duh, just like I don’t have to figure out how to make bread by trial and error, I shouldn’t have to figure out how to code an AJAX preview by trial and error. I guess I need to get better at training myself to think DRYly, so this kind of process will seem as natural as it should.