Ten Forward crew's winter holiday party

What a year. 

The struggle has been real, but we're all here and all healthy, and that's saying a lot. We welcomed some new crew members, experimented with remote team bonding, and guested on multiple podcasts, among other wins.  

Read on for some of Ten Forward's highlights from the challenging year that was 2020. 

Crew News

HELLOS

We welcomed several new crew members in 2020, including:

• Apprentice mobile developer Elaheh Jabbarifard
• Junior project facilitator Terry Oostdyk
• Senior developer Tricia DiPiazza
• Senior developer Alex Petitjean

With the new additions, Ten Forward is now 66% women, as is our tech staff, and our full team is 33% people of color. We're excited to keep improving our racial and ethnic diversity in 2021! 

GOODBYES

We wished Ten Forward developer Kyla Harper a fond farewell this fall, as she ventured off to new adventures in Seattle. We'll miss you, Kyla!

How We've Shared

VOLUNTEERING

Like so many, Ten Forward staff moved our volunteering online in 2020. Here are some of the local groups and organizations we donated our time to last year:

• Madison Women in Tech
• Maydm
• YWeb Career Academy
• Forward Fest
• Urban Triage

SPEAKING 

Knowledge and experience is meant to be shared, and that's our aim at Ten Forward. Here's a list of some of the conferences we spoke at and podcasts we guested on in 2020.

Lady Business podcast

Co-owner Hilary Stohs-Krause was featured on the "Lady Business" podcast, talking about the ways that startups and the entrepreneurial community interact with and intersect with technology. 

PHP UK Conference, 

This London conference in mid-February was the last in-person professional event Ten Forward attended; co-owner Hilary Stohs-Krause gave a talk focused on early-career developers that shares tips and tricks for being successful in tech, and clears up various misconceptions about being a programmer.

The Ruby on Rails Podcast

In advance of the release of RailsConf virtual presentations, Ten Forward co-owner Hilary Stohs-Krause was interviewed about her talk, "Why We Worry About All the Wrong Things".

RailsConf

Co-owner Hilary Stohs-Krause recorded a presentation of her talk "Why We Worry About All the Wrong Things" for this virtual conference. In it, she explores what contributes to our sense of risk and how we process fear, followed by how we can channel that fear into productive outcomes that make us safer, happier and less stressed.

CodeNewbie podcast

Software developer Janessa Tran was interviewed about her experiences contributing to open source, and talked about strategies for how newer programmers can can get involved. 

Treehouse Festival

For this live-streamed conference, co-owner Hilary Stohs-Krause was invited to give her presentation on how non-technical backgrounds point to superpowers that are increasingly valuable for technical positions.

Ruby Rogues podcast

Co-owner Hilary Stohs-Krause spoke with the Ruby Rogues folks about her conference talk, "Why We Worry About All the Wrong Things", including a discussion with the panelists around when fear is a good thing.

WRITING

We've also shared on our blog. Here are some of our favorite blog posts from the last year:

• Three ways tech companies can support Black Lives Matter in their communities
  
• "Adapt and Persist": Education and tech during COVID-19
• Ten Forward interviewed about how we're adapting during the pandemic
• Rails & Regex: Validate for length of a number with or without a hyphen

And here are our five most popular posts from 2020:

1. So you want to embed a prototype into your website
   
2. Integrating an array column with Simple Form in Rails
3. How to add a "copy to clipboard" button to your website
4. Accounting for Daylight Savings Time with Rails ActiveSupport::TimeZone
5. How to make a text field's width increase and decrease dynamically based on user input

Software and Projects

NEW CLIENT SPOTLIGHT

Widen is a Madison-based company whose digital asset management and product information management solutions power the marketing content for hundreds of global brands. We've been partnering with Widen on the development of a native mobile app for their customers to use on the go. 

Developed at the University of Wisconsin, Diversity Inventory is a tool for collecting, tracking, and reporting on key data elements related to diversity initiatives across university campuses. We built and developed DI's marketing site.  

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