In April 2013 we hosted our very first Ruby on Rails Installfest in Sydney. Since then it has gone from strength to strength.
For the first two years we held regular Installfests in Sydney and Melbourne. And in 2015 we hosted the first Brisbane event to record numbers. Later that year we included Adelaide in the schedule. Next month we are excited to be hosting our very first Perth event. Installfest is now Australia-wide - woohoo!
The Ruby on Rails Installfest is a free community event organised and held by reinteractive that is designed to get brand new developers up and running with Ruby on Rails. We hope to inspire our participants to continue learning and to become part of our wonderful and supportive community. Some of our original Installfest attendees are now regular mentors at these events. And some of our mentors go on to become part of the team here at reinteractive, or at other companies in Australia. We have an attendee in Brisbane who began with Installfest and followed it up with Rails Girls. She became a regular at BrisRuby and Coder Club meetups and worked her way through every one of the six Installfest guides. She is now a mentor at Installfest and is about to commence a career as a Rails developer.
In Melbourne a lovely man came along to our event. He was a plumber and his adult children had dared him to come along. He asked a lot of questions trying to make sense of everything. They were very insightful questions and our mentors really had to scratch their heads to find answers for him. But by the end of the night he had built a working Rails app and had a much greater understanding of how such things work. I certainly hope his children were forced to eat their words.
On a slight tangent, we have a couple in Brisbane who met at an Installfest and are about to celebrate their first anniversary together. Sometimes Installfest is not just about learning Rails. :-) Last month in Melbourne, a very special milestone was reached. We welcomed our 1,000th participant to Installfest! To celebrate the occasion, our good friends at Code School helped us out with a gift to all attendees. Everyone who attended that event got a free three month subscription to Code School. Code School is an awesome resource for anyone wishing to become a developer, and the perfect complement to the six guides that make up the comprehensive Ruby on Rails Installfest curriculum.
With 1,000 budding Rails developers through the door, we are now looking towards our next 1,000. Installfest New Zealand is on our radar as well as other destinations in the near future.
If you would like to host an Installfest in your city, please contact me at community@reinteractive.net. I’d love to hear from you.
