It’s that time again! The awesome team at the Women in Computer Science group at UCT asked ask back again this year to run our Intro to Rails course for some interested students. (We’ve been there before, in August 2015 and April last year). Thank you for inviting us, and for providing lunch and snacks all day for everyone! 🙌
We had an interesting mix of experience levels and academic years. Some people were quite new to programming, some had quite a lot of experience. Some had used git before, for some it was brand new. It led to lots of interesting conversations! :) We did our Three Most Important Things activity after lunch. We did it then to try and break through the pizza coma and to help attendees reflect on what they’d done so far.
People mentioned things like:
- how fun and nice to read Ruby is;
- using Heroku for deploying applications;
- the acronym CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete).
We tried something a bit different this time, based on feedback from the attendees. We nudged them over to Try Ruby to do some more playing with Ruby, without Rails. This seemed to work especially well for those with a little less experience. The Intro to Rails course is quite full-on: you get lots of info about Ruby and Rails quickly. Taking a step back and looking at Ruby on its own felt like a good direction to take.
It also helped that Try Ruby is browser-based: no need to install things. This is especially useful because we were using lab computers. Students don’t have admin access to them, and so can’t install stuff on them. We bypassed this with help from Craig in the IT department (thank you, Craig!) and running a script that does a lot of the installation for us.
Our next “regular” RailsBridge
Keep an eye on our meetup group for details of our next workshop. We’re aiming for June or July. Hope to see you there! :)