InstallFest¶

The InstallFest is meant to get all the students' laptops configured correctly, so they can hit the ground running during the workshop the following day.

The InstallFest App¶

The Installfest App is located at http://installfest.railsbridge.org. You may use this app live, but see below for a process that allows you to do "hot fixes" during the installfest.

Each page has a little "[git]" link in the top right corner that allows you to submit fixes as pull requests directly from GitHub (https://github.com/railsbridge/installfest).

Process for the InstallFest:¶

• Have someone do registration, nametags
• Label some tables Mac / Windows / Linux, greeter should direct people to the right place
• Helpful to Partition not just Windows, Mac, but finer grained than that, so encourage people to sit with people with similar systems
  Those people help each other -- hot fixes are distributed by word of mouth

At the EngineYard workshop, they experimented with having teacher training during the install fest. Feedback was that it worked well, so we plan to do that again.

Roles¶

1. Organizer

• The workshop organizers should have no task assigned to them, but should keep themselves available to notice issues and delegate things they notice need doing.
• make sure you have USB drives with copies of XCode if possible

2. InstallFest TA

• check in with the organizers, otherwise look for raised hands and sit with students and walk/type through issues, look for confused faces and proactively ask people how they are doing, say reassuring things
• identify TAs by OS expertise
• TAs should group minority OS's together (e.g. Tiger people together)
• if you solve a problem in the instructions, after you solve the problem and have verified it works on the students machine, you are responsible to go to the editor, update the instructions and word-of-mouth tell people to ctrl-R

3. Instructions Editor

• one person or ideally a pair so that there are two eyes on the changes, and can potentially multi-task

• it is useful to have instructions change on the fly, so before the event (or at the beginning of it),

  1) fork https://github.com/railsbridge/installfest
  2) create a heroku app named like: http://installfest-railsbridge29.heroku.com , push to that app
  3) make changes and everytime a change is made, push and tell the organizer or announce the change
  4) submit a pull request, if you have idle time or at the end of the evening
  Note: Even if a pull request is not accepted as is, it still helps prompt a solution, so don't worry if your requests don't get accepted verbatim
  5) at the end of the evening, delete the Heroku app, and tell students the canonical URL is http://installfest.railsbridge.org