Latest Articles on Rails Girls by Our Team

We’re excited to once again be a sponsor of the next Rails Girls Sydney event coming up in July!

Rails Girls is a free two-day workshop that gives women the chance to dive into the magical world of Ruby on Rails in a safe and approachable environment.

Last week our team were lucky enough to attend the second Ruby Conference held in Australia. As a new comer to the Community over the last year and as the Community Manager here at reInteractive, I thought I’d share my take on what I got out of last week’s talks and events.

Felix talked about how helping others learn will actually help you improve your own code. You don’t truly understand something until you can explain it simply and clearly to others. This is very true and something I think all professional developers and new developers alike can take from this. Go out and pair with others, your knowledge will grow exponentially just from talking about concepts with others.

Today we stepped out of our usual workspace, put our emails aside and headed to the first ever Rails Girls Next. Ildiko Balla and I continued our Rails journey and our awesome Developer Geoff Hodgson was there to help out and mentor.

We started the day with our first tutorial on Sinatra to get a better understanding about how the web works. Then on we went to do a test driven development exercise and learned to write tests for our code. Last, but not least we programmed our very own Ruby ATM and discovered more of Ruby’s features and syntax.

Last weekend, Ready Set Startup and Swinburne University hosted a RailsGirls event in Melbourne, and I had the privilege of attending as a coach to meet and mentor some amazing new people, both with and without prior programming experience. The event was split over two days, the Friday evening and Saturday, with the idea being that Friday would be spent getting everyone set up with Ruby, Rails, Git, etc. so we could get right into it on Saturday morning.

Friday evening kicked off with the coaches trying to free electric power boards from their plastic packaging with their bare hands and a small screw, while the attendees got to know each other and started setting their laptops up. All the required software (RailsInstaller, Sublime Text and the Heroku Toolbelt) had all been thoughtfully prepared on special RailsGirls-branded USB sticks. We did have some issues with the supplied version of RailsInstaller and those on OS X 10.9 Mavericks, however, but for the most part the installation party was pretty smooth sailing.