Ruby on Rails Outreach Workshop for Women
I attended the 15th RoR Outreach Workshop for Women sponsored and hosted by Railsbridge and ModCloth on April 8-9, 2011.
For someone with not much of a technical background in programming, I have to say that this was one of the best workshops I’ve been to. 100% volunteer-supported so not only is it free, but you can tell that everyone who is there (volunteers and participants) really just wants to be there. It’s a great environment, the work-space (ModCloth office) was so conducive for a coding workshop. It was open enough for people to interact and feel comfortable asking questions, yet not noisy enough to be distracting.
One of the other things I appreciated about the workshop was how organized it was. They split the workshop into two days — the first day (1-2 hours) was dedicated to just setting up Rails3 and other required tools (e.g., FF SQlite manager, github, heroku) on our computers so that we would be able to immediately dive into building our RoR project the following day without technical hiccups. Day 2 was a full-day hands-on workshop focused on building the app.
They also split us into level-competency groups based on two simple “filtering” questions when we registered. I think most of us were very happy with the groups that we got assigned to. Learning is so much more efficient and effective when grouped properly.
After about an hour of an intro to RoR, an excellent sponsored lunch from Triptych, and a few hours of coding, I built my first RoR application: Suggestotron
DevChixWiki is a great reference for me (and anyone starting out on RoR) if I ever plan to build an app from scratch again.
I also learned about cucumber, which our team at cardinalblue doesn’t use because we build our own tests. I was/am so fascinated by how ”english” rake cucumber reads!
Umm ok… this is my first post about anything vaguely technical so my level of discomfort is maxing out.
On a more personal level (returning to comfort zone… ), I really appreciated the “for Women” part of this outreach program. We were told that a 2-3 years ago, the active RoR community in the Bay Area had only THREE women. Yesterday, I saw at least 40 women students (and a few more teacher-volunteers) in the room. It’s a great place for women to feel comfortable in a field where we are highly under-represented, not to mention a place to meet amazing people, in general.
The volunteers even organized an “after-party” for us to mingle at Ozone. I met people who have product managing, design/UX, engineering roles at various interesting startups including kiva, zynga, and airbnb (which cardinalblue has used to rent our place in the Bay Area and highly recommend).
I intend to meet up again with some of the people I met at the workshop, and definitely would like to be more involved with this group if I spend enough/more time here in the Bay Area. Regardless, I highly recommend the sfruby meetup group to anyone (and in particular, the “for Women” one for women) interested in learning or teaching RoR in the Bay Area.
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Ching-Mei
