[Events] RailsBridge event braindump

[Asheesh Laroia]

I'll provide a little context, since Karen didn't: She attended ("today", 
AKA Saturday) a Railsbridge event in San Francisco. I caught her on IRC 
and asked her to write a note for our Events list.

On Sat, 5 Feb 2011, Karen Rustad wrote:

> 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).

I asked her on IRC how the day was divided, in terms of spending time in 
large-group lecture format, versus lots of one-on-one coaching. It seems 
like mostly there were *some* lectures as needed toward the beginning of 
the day. Since the groups were separated out by programming background, 
the instructors in each sub-group chose how to start the day. Then people 
followed a set tutorial for getting a Rails app started the way the 
instructors suggested, and once they were done with that, they moved on to 
do their own thing, asking for help as needed.

Is my summary accurate?

Also, how much freedom did you have in what to work on? Once you followed 
the http://www.wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Rails_3_Curriculum 
tutorial, did you then throw away the thing you made and start on a 
project of your own?

> 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.

Here, when you say "didn't meet any other students", I take it to mean 
you're talking about people's current vocation. I hope there were 59 other 
"students" of the RailsBridge event, but you mean no one else was 
primarily spending their attention on an academic program.

For me, for what it's worth, I think that's great that it was almost 
entirely non-students. I imagine that has to do with the outreach they're 
doing.

> 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!

Maybe I can talk to these TAs and learn their secrets. One day.

Hah re: "A beer or three".

> 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.

The "SF Ruby mailing list" is the email list for the SF Ruby meetup group, 
I take it?

Awesome -- thanks for this summary.

I guess one other question: the event has been advertised as having child 
care in the past. Did they have it, and what did it logistically mean? (I 
imagine it's just, "You find someone willing to play with children, and 
find the kids and that person a room", but maybe there's more to it -- 
maybe it's important to rotate people in and out, for example, or to split 
up the kids into age groups, or ...?) (Or maybe they didn't need it this 
time because the attendees happened not to bring any kids.)

Oh, and I guess if you could comment on the gender balance, that would be 
swell. (-:

Oh, and also: were there any tidbits of wisdom that the instructors shared 
with you, or motivations for why they ran the event? What did they or you 
think was the most important part?

Thanks for writing all this up! It's a huge help to those of us thousands 
of miles away for the time being.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
You learn to write as if to someone else because NEXT YEAR YOU WILL BE
"SOMEONE ELSE."