[Events] RailsBridge event braindump

[Karen Rustad]

(because Asheesh insisted I write one, and ASAP)

On Friday evening, all the students and most of the instructors met in the
Twitter lunchroom for an install-fest of all the software we would need for
the workshop. We had been receiving email reminders for the previous two
weeks to download and install (as far as we could before running into
problems) the software prior to Friday; if everyone tried to download it all
at once, we would've broken Twitter's poor guest wifi. Some instructors had
some of the necessary files (for Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu) on flash drives
just in case. One issue I noticed: other than noticing that someone looked
like they knew what they were doing, there was no way to tell the
instructors from the students--we all had the same paper nametags. I
suggested fancy hats, or maybe capes, so we could tell who to ask for help
at a distance.

Links to the install instructions / everything that the Ruby on Rails
workshop used:
http://www.wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Workshop_Installation_Notes_Rails_3

Bright and early Saturday morning, we met as a large group (~60 students,
almost as many instructors/TAs) to briefly talk about logistics and
administrivia. The leader also invited students to come up and say what they
were hoping to get out of the event. Some people did, though it wasn't
particularly effective I don't think with such a large group, in such a
large room; there wasn't really time to get into a big discussion, anyway.

We then spent the day divided up into small classes. In our RSVP we'd listed
our previous coding/related experience, and the organizers assigned people
to class roughly by experience level -- so beginners were together, people
who'd studied CS in school (but not used it much since) were together, etc.
My class consisted of three students, one instructor, *and* three TAs. Yes,
as it happened there were more instructors than students in my section
(though one of the TAs primarily spent the time taking notes on what parts
of the curriculum worked/didn't work for future reference)! I asked one of
the instructors about it afterward and they said that they'd found that it
actually made more sense to have the lowest student-teacher ratio in the
more advanced classes--"Beginners tend to have similar questions, and they
get intimidated if they've got people looking over their shoulder the entire
time. More advanced students tend to have problems or ask questions in ways
that are very divergent, since their backgrounds are more different."

On the teaching v. coaching debate... I guess this was mostly teaching,
especially the background information parts. Other than that, we'd go down
the curriculum wiki page as a group (the instructor's computer was broadcast
on a monitor), typing in the commands along with the instructor and the
instructor explaining what each one did. If a command didn't work or
something exploded, we each had a TA to try and diagnose what went wrong and
figure out how to fix it (primarily at the beginning; I had some problems
with gems on Ubuntu :P).

There wasn't much standardization between instructors in terms of material.
As far as I can tell, all of the sections followed this wiki page for their
curriculum: http://www.wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Rails_3_CurriculumHowever,
approaches varied, and at the very least my instructor felt
empowered to spend time covering background/big-picture concepts on some
things (how do different hosting solutions work? what the crap is going on
when you use git? what is m-v-c? what is test-driven development?) and skip
a couple parts of the official curriculum (like digging around the SQLite
database, or the details of cucumber). Part of why one of my TAs was taking
notes during our section was to hopefully try and standardize the volunteer
training a little more in the future, and record the kinds of background
info / helpful whiteboard drawings that my instructor provided us so others
could model that. :)

My understanding is that some of the beginner sections spent somewhat more
time on typical 'programming 101' material, aka learning Ruby the language.
My section spent hardly any time at all on that, though--the overwhelming
focus of the day was on 1.) best practices for software development as a
whole and 2.) various nice things that Rails takes care of for you. I wasn't
really expecting that, but it makes some sense. That reflects the reasons
why most people came to this event--I didn't meet any other students, most
seem to have been working professionals in San Francisco who are trying to
speak the language of the engineers they work with. There were also a few
ladies I met who were more businessy/entrepreneurial and needed to at least
learn the basics of web app programming to get their business idea off the
ground, or at least learn enough to get help.

We took quick breaks every hour. Lunch was at 12:30 and generously provided
by (I think) Twitter; in any case, it was free and on-site, so I was able to
chat with some folks not in my section then. Food coma / sleepiness was a
major issue post-lunch for a lot of people. Not sure what to do about that.
9:30 AM to 4 PM, on a Saturday, is a long day...

At the end of the day, we met again as a group, did thank-yous and more
administrivia. People stuck around and chatted for a long time before we
slowly drifted to the after-party a block and a half away. The instructors
and TAs had a (slightly) more formal decompression/intel session after the
closing; I don't know what they discussed. The after party had food and
billiards and most people ordered a beer or three. It was cheery, wacky, and
fun!

Traditionally the after party was where people would form Ruby on Rails
"book clubs" with fellow students--i.e. affinity groups where people could
meet and help each other go further in their learning post-workshop. I
didn't form or join one of these, but I did play pool with a group of
awesome Rubyites and I'm supposed to play board games with them next week or
so, so maybe that counts? :) The wiki also had links to books (not just on
RoR, but things like http://progit.org/ too) and online Ruby and/or Rails
tutorials that people could consult. And there's a post-workshop meeting of
the SF Ruby group on Wednesday that is primarily (I think) for instructors,
but students are welcome to come too and hack away. Oh, and they put us all
on the SF Ruby mailing list. So there is that.

</braindump>

-- Karen
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