Freelance Web Design & Development

When I first heard about the Ruby on Rails workshops for women organized by Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen in San Francisco, I was jealous that they were on the opposite coast. But lo and behold — the very same event came to Boston last weekend! (Yet another reason why Boston is awesome — the academic/technical community is conducive to cool events like this.)

The event was targeted at women (though some men attended, too) who were either new to programming or new to Ruby; I volunteered as a TA to help answer students’ questions (along with a bunch of super friendly and knowledgeable people from the Boston Ruby community, which is awesome; too bad their meetups generally conflict with improv classes for me). The whole thing was awesome! I loved getting to meet/know better people in the Ruby community and meeting new people who were just getting started with Ruby. There were people from a wide variety of backgrounds there — i loved helping people get their code to do stuff! Some of the students I worked with were clearly smart enough to follow the install instructions and workshop handout on their own, but they just needed some hand-holding and moral support as a motivation to actually do it — which is why events like this are so key to getting people involved in Ruby/programming. I also loved when students got really excited about their code doing stuff — a reminder of why I got into programming in the first place, because I love the high that comes from seeing code you’ve been tweaking suddenly work.

Teacher Sarah and organizer/TA Liana both blogged about how well the event went. A lot of the students, TAs, and organizers tweeted about it too, mostly saying great things!

Unfortunately, I can’t attend the followup Open Source Code Crunch activity organized by Liana, because I’m already involved with a project at the Free Software Foundation on Wednesday nights. (Why yes, I am a huge nerd!)