Posted by For this year’s Xmas episode, I am talking to Linda Liukas. Linda is the author and illustrator of Hello Ruby, a children’s picture book about the whimsical world of computers, as well as the founder of Rails Girls, a global movement to teach young women programming in over 260 cities.
Linda is a totally exceptional person and she’s originally from Helsinki, Finland. She’s created a kickstarter for her book Hello Ruby in 2015 and this project totally went through the roof – by end she gathered more than $ 380.000 and of course her book Hello Ruby was a big hit.
Images by Linda Liukas, used with permisson
She turned Hello Ruby into a series of books – there are now multiple Hello Ruby books available that also discuss topics like the internet or machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Did I mention that her books got also translated into many languages? How many you’re asking? 25!
Linda is also the founder of Rails Girls, a global initiative that teaches young women the basics of coding using the programming language Ruby and the popular web framework Ruby on Rails – hence the name Rails Girls. This initiative dates back to 2010 when she held the first event in Helsinki – that’s pretty much 10 years ago now! Since then there have been events pretty much everywhere and as I checked the website I found several events coming to Japan in 2020.
In addition to all this, Linda is an awesome public speaker – her TED Talk called “A delightful way to teach kids about computers” had more than 2 Mio. views at the time I checked to prepare for my interview with her.
