Rails Girls Atlanta
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend Rails Girls Atlanta at Highgroove Studios. Rails Girls is a 2 day event where women of all ages are provided with the tools to learn Ruby on Rails and to make the tech world more woman friendly.
The first night was the Installation Party. Everyone brought their laptops and made sure we all had successfully installed the Rails Installer as we chatted and had snacks. There were about 30 girls there to learn, and about half as many coaches and others there to help and talk to us. After we all had Rails on our computers, we took part in a Friday Hug!
The next day, we all had breakfast and coffee thanks to Octane. We even got these awesome mugs:
Next, we met the coaches, and then broke up into groups of 4. My coach works at MailChimp and uses Ruby on Rails every day. He knew A LOT, and showed me a lot of cool tricks while coding and using Sublime Text. It seemed like I always ran into problems that weren’t common, but he helped me figure them out. The Rails Installer wouldn’t even install on my computer and he had to help me install “by hand”! I definitely learned a lot!
I jumped right into Ruby with the Rails Girls Guide. It takes you step by step to build a web app. This was my first one. After I finished that, I started adding fun things to it like comments and then put it up on a Heroku server. The next app was a map with the different locations of Rails Girls attendees. I learned a lot with this one..I ran into problems and had to look into the documentation for help.
After a few hours..which flew by, it was time for lunch. Lunch was by the Good Food Truck. It was so …good! Here’s our menu:
I had the Chutney Grilled Cheese. I wanted to eat all of them that ever existed.
After lunch, the whole group got back together and we got to hear a few people talk to us about various topics. We learned about programming our ‘Bento Box’, feeling and being confident in a mostly male dominated field, automation testing, becoming a developer, Git, GitHub, and becoming a Ruby Newbie.
After the talks, we got some more time to fine tune our apps before a few of us presented them to the group. I was asked to show my twitter map and talk about what I changed. There were a lot of great apps people came up with. I can’t wait to play with Ruby more and get more into it and build more apps!
That was the end of our day, so we all walked a couple of blocks to Sauced for the after party. I didn’t take any pictures there, but we had some great drinks, appetizers, and got the chance to talk with everyone again! I met a lot of cool people, and can’t wait to see them again at other Ruby events.
Overall the weekend was awesome! I learned so much while meeting some great people and networking. They also had some pretty great sponsors that left us with a lot of cool stickers, t-shirts, gadgets, etc. Thanks to everyone involved!
I can’t wait for Rails Girls to come back to Atlanta, and to attend the meet ups!
I feel like dancing
all of the bikes parked inside of Highgroove Studios