Getting started with tech at Rails Girls Berlin

  • Tatjana

    As Office Manager and Resource Manager Tatjana is in charge of tasks like our payroll, paying vendors, preparing reports on Accounts Receivables, Expenses and some higher-level profitability calculations. Tatjana has a university degree in Modern Chinese Studies along with Business Administration from the University of Cologne, which might explain her marked preference for chinese food and traveling to Asia. Tatjana loves building furniture and enjoys strolling around in the city looking for new street art in her spare time.

On 13th & 14th of April the Railslove Girls attended Rails Girls Berlin.Developer Lena was one of the coaches, Liane (Designer) and I attendees, and Railslove was one of the sponsors.

It was a really, really great event and we had an awesome time. We especially enjoyed the vibrant and inspiring atmosphere and were amazed by all the energy and creativity sparked by 100 hackerettes ^_^ The feedback on Twitter was absolutely amazing!

During the day the coaches helped groups of 4-6 women with different backgrounds to build a basic Ruby on Rails application - CRUD for one resource with photo upload. In between we went through a Ruby tutorial (http://tryruby.org) and heard some great lightning talks.

The coaches made sure we understood everything, and even if we‘re still in the early stages of learning Rails, Rails Girls was a very good and interesting way to gain first impressions of Rails!

In just one day, the Rails Girls crew covered a wide range of topics - we learned lots about Ruby internals like variables, methods, strings, database tables, models, gems and so on. Besides that we also picked up some basic Unix skills, like how to change the directory and restart the server, what commands belong into the terminal and what into the text editor. And last but not least we learned about web technology in general and browsers.

One of the many great outcomes of this event is that there are already plans for a follow-up workshop in Berlin next Saturday from 12-18:00 at the co.up coworking space (http://co-up.de), where participants can go through the tutorial again, refine and extend their code, maybe introduce some "comments" to the "ideas" ... Lena will be there again and more coaches will join!

Rails Girls CookbookWe truly felt lucky to have such a talented and enthusiastic crowd of people with us at Rails Girls and hope many of us will continue working with Rails in the future. I‘m pretty sure Liane and I will... and maybe some day soon we‘ll build something cool! We‘ll let you know :)

Lots of thanks to the fantastic and patient coaches & organisers of this fantastic weekend!

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Jan Kus
+49 179 1 35 35 39