Bloom & Wild x Rails Girls
This weekend Bloom & Wild were one of the brands sponsoring Rails Girls London. Rails Girls in an awesome initiative to get more women coding by running free, 1 day workshops in Ruby on Rails. They started back in 2013 and now have a community of international volunteers with events happening all over the globe.
Rails Girls is an initiative close to my heart. As a career changer, so someone who doesn’t have a computer science degree AND a woman the stats would suggest that I’m in roughly the 5% of practicing developers. I was the only woman in the company for my last two roles (so the first three years of my tech career), and am currently the only female dev at Bloom & Wild. Although we have a female tester and product manager currently, and Catalina a mobile dev starting tomorrow. Hurrah! I’ve heard on the grapevine that once your dev team has 2+ women it can snowball… 🤞
There’s loads of research to suggest that diverse teams perform better. Individuals from different genders, races, backgrounds and experiences bring different perspectives which lead to innovative solutions. There’s also been extensive research published that shows companies with women in senior management are more profitable. And if we ever want to address the gender pay gap then it’s imperative that we get more women into high paying industries such as tech and finance.
So supporting events such as Rails Girls is a must. This is the third year I’ve volunteered as a coach, and was super proud to be there representing Bloom & Wild as a sponsor along with fellow backend dev Adrian and our VP Engineering, Steve. Each event has grown in scale, this one hosted at Deliveroo had 200 students and 100 coaches.
Friday night was spent at the “Installation Party”, helping the students get their machines set up ready for the workshop on Sat. When pizza, beer and interesting/interested people are involved installing Rails becomes a lot more fun!
We kicked off Saturday with a breakfast of champions (two glasses of orange juice and two small cakes 💪) then launched into the sponsor talks. Not only great to be encouraging women into code, but fab to see the Bloom & Wild brand up there with this roster of cool peeps 😎.
I gave a brief intro to who Bloom & Wild are, our journey and how our tech is key to our growth. Touching on examples such as being one of the first to integrate our iOS app with ApplePay, building tracking technology using carrier API integrations for proactive resends and halving our website product carousel load time with a website & API rewrite this summer.
I went on to talk about some features on our product roadmap for the year ahead which is a tech buzzword fest (but they’re buzzwords for a reason right?). Personalisation powered by machine learning, augmented reality bouquets, flower image recognition, video messaging — tons of exciting and innovative stuff to look forward to building.
Then it was time to dive into the workshop. Students are split into mac and windows users, so I quickly grabbed a couple friendly applers in the shape of Nina and Vicky and got down to it. We started with a brief intro to Ruby; they both have some prior coding (Nina updates the website as part of her current role and Vicky’s working a data analyst), so we didn’t have to cover basic concepts such as strings and booleans. But we looked at how methods are defined and called, what’s meant by “Object Orientated” and how topics are grouped into modules such as Math.
The real fun started when we got cracking with the walkthrough. You can do so much with Rails in such a short space of time. So even before we broke for the lightening talks we’d created the app, discussed Rails and it’s “magic”, how helpful generators are, what’s a server and what’s meant by “server side” and how database migrations work.
We had an excellent plethora of lightening talks with all sorts of topics from how to bust the imposter syndrome, the ethics of coding, why we’re all experts, through to Harry Potter and the Magic of Ruby ⚡️. Myself and fellow Bloom & Wild dev Adrian did a talk on Sonic Pi, a super fun and creative coding tool which allows you to live code music using Ruby. Our finale being “Ruby” by the Kaiser Chief obvs.
After a lunching on a selection of fried chicken, more pizza, pasta, salad, flatbread and prawn crackers, it was time to get back to the codez. Queue explaining MVC and ERB, the pros and cons of using a style library such as Twitter Bootstrap and the power of git.
By 5pm we were all pretty zonked but dead chuffed with what we’d achieved — a working ideas logger with comments, styles, image upload all pushed to Github. I’m not the best at taking compliments, so being told I’m an inspiration resulted in me turning a rather fetching tone of crimson 😊. This is my day to day, it’s the students doing the hard graft, learning, getting out of the comfort zone, exploring new opportunities and generally being uber impressive.
The term “giving back” is a funny one. I learnt loads, gave my first large scale talk and met some fantastic people, so I feel more like I gained then gave. Huge thanks to the Rails Girls team, the sponsors, other coaches and all the amazing students. It was a truly enjoyable day, until next year 👋
