# Sarah Mei

> Co-founder of RailsBridge, and one of the clearest voices for the idea that code is really about people.

**Sarah Mei** is a longtime Ruby community leader best known for co-founding **RailsBridge**, a program of free, beginner-friendly workshops that opened the door into Ruby on Rails for a lot of newcomers, especially women. She started it in June 2009 with Sarah Allen, on a simple hypothesis: if you teach women Ruby, you get more women who are Ruby developers. Their answer was a free weekend workshop, aimed first at the San Francisco Ruby community, which at the time was only about 3 percent women.

RailsBridge worked, and it grew. In 2013 the umbrella organization was renamed **Bridge Foundry** so the same welcoming-workshop model could stretch beyond Ruby and Rails to other technologies, with RailsBridge continuing as the Ruby and Rails "bridge." Sarah has also served as a director of Ruby Central, the nonprofit behind the RailsConf and RubyConf conferences.

She is also one of the community's sharpest writers and speakers on the human side of software. In her talk **"Livable Code,"** she pushes back on the idea that a codebase should be a pristine, architected showpiece, comparing that to a staged house that looks beautiful but that no one can actually live in. Good code, she argues, is code that is comfortable for the real team that has to live and work in it every day. It is a very [MINASWAN](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/minaswan.md) way to think about programming: the people come first.

*Related:* [MINASWAN](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/minaswan.md) · [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md) · [Chad Fowler](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/chad-fowler.md)

## Sources
- Bridge Foundry: History and where we are now (RailsBridge founded June 2009 by Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen; renamed Bridge Foundry in 2013): https://bridgefoundry.org/history-and-where-we-are-now
- Livable Code (Sarah Mei, Brighton Ruby 2017; talk and speaker bio listing her as a Bridge Foundry founder and Ruby Central director): https://brightonruby.com/2017/livable-code-sarah-mei/

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/people/sarah-mei/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)