A bit more of a year ago, I got to know about RailsGirls initiative, I joined one of their workshops and had a great time. So I joined other of their initiatives, like meeting on Sundays in a more informal way to have a coffee while talk about coding, and of course Rails Girls Summer of Code!!, where with my pair @juliaguar, we contributed to Diaspora free social network.
After one year of profiting of all the good work done by RailsGirls, I had the feeling to give back something, so once I knew the Hackday was coming up and also knowing that @phansch was taking part as a coach, made me take the decision to sign as a coach for beginners.
Honestly I must say I had no clue how to do it, nor did I have much time to think about it. Saturday morning arrived, I had a cold, I was tired and thought OMG! how am I going to be able to explain anything. Anyway, the fact was that I was going to the Hackday and let’s see.
After a first “hello” , a coffee (10 a.m. is a good moment to have a coffee on a Saturday), and realizing that I knew some people, we did a round to introduce ourselves, our name, experience, expectations about the workshop. This time there were around 5 complete beginners and the rest were study groups that work on a week basis and the Hackday is a good excuse to impulse a bit more the project.
Suddenly I forgot about the cold, the fatigue, it was fun being there! So three of us wanted to coach the beginners which was really cool, after setting up rails, discussion a bit how to proceed, where to start from, what was the background of everybody.
We started and decided to have the RailsGirls tutorial as a guide, but we would not use so much the gems, but explain how things worked from scratch, so that Rails “magic” could be better understood. We used the white board to explain the main MVC principles, then went into see how routing works, how models, controllers, views look like.
We stopped for lunch, everybody brought something and then we shared it :-), and after lunch, for an hour or so, we had lightning talks, and yes I also gave one, “Free/Libre software and Open Source, because social responsability matters”
RT @carolina: Coaching at @railsgirls_bln Hackday!! http://t.co/zmBLiSqGRs