[Events] RailsBridge event braindump

[Karen Rustad]

> 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_Curriculumtutorial, did you then throw away the thing you made and start on a project
> of your own?


The only project we worked on at the workshop was the tutorial
project--that, plus background info, plus answering all the various
questions/curiosities people had (plus breaks) took the entire time we had
available. There wasn't a freeform hacking session. I'm pretty sure that was
the case for everybody. People did discuss apps they were building or wanted
to build during off-time when we were chatting, but there wasn't any work
being done on them at the workshop. It would've been cool to have had a
hackathon--I would've enjoyed that--but I don't think it could've been fit
in--even as it was, people were pretty tired by the end (though they did
perk up at the afterparty).

Maybe if I go to the meeting on Wednesday, that'll be what happens then?


>
> 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.
>

Yes -- I didn't meet any undergrads or fellow grad students. Though there
were so many people, there probably were at least a couple there.

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

Yes. :)

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.)
>

I noticed one lady brought her (slightly older; age 8-9?) daughter to the
event. She wasn't in my section, though, so I don't know if her daughter
went to class with her or if there was child care during classtime.

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

 Of instructors / TAs, I'd guess it was two-thirds dudes. The head
organizers, Sarah Mei and Amy Chen, were ladies; the representative of
Twitter who got us that sweet space (forget his name) was a dude. Of the
students, it was probably around 70% women.

I don't know exactly how many people total were there. Meetup says in the
end they let 74 students RSVP (originally was 40; there was a huge waiting
list). I'd estimate the number who were there as closer to 60, with 40ish
teachers and TAs.

>
> 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?
>
> One of the instructors, at the very beginning of the day, made some remarks
to encourage students, esp. beginners, to ask questions with abandon-- that
he (and the other instructors) *love* listening to people who are confused
and helping them understand things, that that was why he was there-- "We
totally get off on that."

Another instructor I talked to was mainly concerned with making SF Ruby and
the developer community as a whole more diverse--he works for ModCloth,
which is RoR-based. Given the focus of the company, there's lots of ladies
working in all of the departments...*except* the dev team. No female coders
there. He thought that was criminal, and hoped that teaching at this sort of
event might help.

That same instructor also mentioned that he felt strongly that the
curricular emphasis on best practices was important--that if you start out
in Ruby, doing things like tests and m-v-c separation and whatnot right from
the start, you get good habits, whereas if you start out in (his example)
PHP, you tend to become a sloppy cowboy coder and need eventual
re-education. (I won't say if I agree or not, but that was his take on
things.)

Tidbits of wisdom? Hm... The instructor I ate lunch with told me that
there's a ridiculous shortage of Ruby devs in SF, so if you want a job,
especially a hip startup job, that's *the* thing to learn.

Also, as I mentioned in IRC: "I was talking to one of the volunteers and she
said that she thought the most important aspect of the event wasn't really
any of the material itself, but simply that every person there demonstrably
had a full RoR development setup working on their computer now. Like, almost
in those words. She saw that as the biggest hurdle." Forget actually
learning to write things with it. Because all that setup is the hardest
thing for an individual to do on your own--yet it's impossible to start
without it. (She said this, completely unprompted, and bells went off in my
head along the lines of "This is why the buildhelper is important, dammit!"
:) )

-- Karen
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