Open Workshop Project¶

Mission: Enabling Rails developers everywhere to organize and present high-quality introductory Rails workshops.

Lead: Sarah Mei, sarah mei at gmail dot com.

Summary: Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen are running an introductory Rails workshop series in San Francisco. We are releasing all our topic outlines, slides, logistics notes, etc., and inviting the community to use and modify them.

Mailing list: for workshop organizers, volunteers and teachers

These initial workshops are aimed at getting more women in the SF Ruby community, but the workshop materials are suitable for a general audience. We hope that by releasing them, they'll find a wider audience than just the people we can personally reach.

Resources:

• Would you like a workshop in your town? see Workshop Recipes
• All of the info about how we run workshops
• Read the details of what we teach (slides are linked at the top)
• View workshop slides in-browser
• See the github repo of the slides and workshop materials

How can I help? Currently we need help with the following:

• A website for the project, beyond this wiki page! Hosting is taken care of by Mike Gunderloy, and we'll use the workshops.railsbridge.org subdomain. We need a blog for front page/news, a calendar, and some github integration. Join the mailing list if you're interested.
• Detailed installation instructions for OS X (Leopard, Panther, Tiger). On the DevChix wiki we have very detailed instructions for Windows, but sketchier ones for OS X. Even if you can just give it 15 minutes and try the first thing, go for it.

Please feel free to make an account on the DevChix wiki and edit and add pages, even if you're a guy. We would have started over here on this wiki, but the workshop project actually got going before RailsBridge did. :)

Upcoming Workshops

• We're planning to do one at the end of February 2010, in San Francisco. You can join the SF announcement mailing list to get first dibs on registration.

Past Workshops

• 6/12-6/13 2009 at OrangeLabs in South San Francisco
  • Meetup pages for Friday and Saturday
• 7/31-8/1 2009 at Pivotal Labs in San Francisco
  • Meetup pages for Friday and Saturday
• 9/26-9/27 2009 at sfCube in San Francisco
• 10/3-10/4 2009 at Aloha on Rails
• 10/16-10/17 2009 at Berkman Center, Harvard University in the Boston, MA area (planned)
  • details here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/ruby-on-rails-workshop-for-women/

Feedback from attendees

"In addition to learning way more than I expected, I enjoyed the tone of the entire weekend. It was the only attitude-free, newbie-safe and mama-friendly tech event I have ever attended"¶

"It was wonderful to be surrounded by such motivated expert women programmers. It was a new experience for me. I liked it."¶

"A friendly and supportive environment. I was surprised at how much personal attention and care was given--really a wonderful, wonderful event from a great team!"¶

Read more attendee feedback! (6/13, 8/1)