Rails Girls Pune 2014

The second edition of RailsGirls Pune event was an amazing day spent with some equally amazing folks. The event took place on 13th of December and it saw a huge turnout of around 150+ women from various colleges and companies. It was a free event for beginners interested in learning about coding and building applications using Ruby on Rails.

BigBinary was happy to be one of the sponsors of the event.

The event was organized by Rajashree Malvade, Shifa Khan, Pooja Salpekar, Dominika Stempniewicz, and Magdalena Sitarek.

BigBinary team reached the venue, ThoughtWorks office, Pune, at about 8.30 AM. Rajashree did the introductions and Gautam Rege, and I did the kick off. Gautam introduced Ruby, along with how magical Ruby is and the importance of the event. I spent some time explaining how RailsGirls began, as well as Rails Bridge and other similar events.

Next all instructors were grouped together. Grouping was done in such a way that advanced instructors were paired with intermediate and beginner instructors.

The talented folks from ThoughtWorks had created a fun movie explaining the three different tracks - beginner, intermediate and advanced into which the students were divided.

I, Prathamesh and Richa Trivedi took to one of the advanced track groups. We started off by pairing people to work with their partner and did a health check of everyones' system. Many of the participants in our group had 1-2 years of professional experience in Java, .Net and so forth. This meant they were quite familiar with setting up various things on their machine and that was a great help. We started with basics of ruby- variables, loops, blocks, each, methods, classes, etc. This took about 2 hours and then we started with Rails and MVC.

Santosh paired with Dinesh and participated in intermediate track of a group of four students. They started with basics of Ruby and later started to build simple blog app using Rails and deployed apps to Heroku by the end of the day.

At about 11.30, Siddhant Chothe from TechVision, did an inspiring talk about Web Accessibility, Wiable gem, and his journey in Ruby & Rails world.

Then We did the Bentobox activity. Participants were handed a page listing various aspects of software development like infrastructure, frontend, application, storage in boxes. We read out technologies like XML, JSON, AJAX, MongoDB, etc, and asked everyone to write these on stickies and place them in appropriate boxes on the "Bentobox". This was helpful for the participants to understand what different technologies are related to web-development and where they are used.

Then everyone broke out for lunch. Our enthusiastic lot stayed back to avoid the rush, and began with Rails development. We started by explaining basic MVC concepts and how Rails helps as a framework. We started with a simple App, and created "pages/home" static home page. This helped our group to understand rails generators, routes, controllers and views. With our first page up and running, we went for lunch.

After lunch, a session on Origami was conducted by Nima Mankar. It was a good stress buster after all of the first session's bombardment over the participants.

Our next objective was to build an app and deploy it to heroku. Our group started out to build "The Cat App"! We began with explaining controllers, CRUD operations, parts of URL, REST, etc. We created a Cat model, and everyone loved the beauty and simplicity of migrations and performing create, update, delete, find using ActiveRecord. We quickly moved on to building CatsController and CRUD operations on the same. We made sure we did not use scaffold, so as to explain the underlying magic, instead of scaffold hiding it away.

Soon everyone had a functional App, and it was fun to introduce GorbyPuff as the star of our App, whose images were displayed as cat records, which store name of the image and url to an image.

We then setup the Apps on heroku and were ready for the next part- Showcase. It was amazing to see so many groups complete the Apps and come up with fun, interesting and quirky ideas. One student created Boyfriend Expense (Kharcha) Management App.

The day ended on a high note amid high enthusiasm from all the participants. We finished the workshop with a huge cake for everyone.

Overall, it was well-organized, fun, enthusiastic and a day well spent.

Thanks to Rajshree, Shifa, Pooja, Dominika and Magdalena for organizing such an awesome event. Both Pune edition events, have shown great interest, and it has left us all looking forward for the next one!