Rails Girls London 2019
Bloom & Wild sponsored Rails Girls again this year. Rails Girls is a great initiative that seeks to get more women into coding by providing free workshops in Ruby on Rails. It started back in 2013 and there’s now a community of international volunteers with events happening all over the globe. It’s a really inspiring thing to be a part of, and anything that helps improve the gender balance in the tech industry is something that we are proud to support.
This is the second year that we’ve sponsored, and we had some of the engineering team attending as volunteer coaches, as well as representing Bloom & Wild as a sponsor. This years event was even larger than last year, with over 200 students and 140 coaches, all packed into the Simply Business offices in central London for a day and a half of Rails related fun.
Friday night was spent at the “Installation Party”; it’s here that the coaches get to help the students get their machines set up ready for the workshop on Sat, ponder on the complexities of installing Rails on Windows machines, eat pizza, drink beer and meet new people. Adrian, one of our backend developers, proved to be the Windows installation champion, not only helping students but also coaches who were having installation issues. Well done Adrian 👏. Getting everyone setup and ready for Saturday was key, so that the students had as much time as possible to focus on coding and learning.
Saturday started bright and early with sponsor talks and then we got straight into some Ruby tutorials using TryRuby. This gave the students a basic idea of the Ruby language and got them ready for to start on their first app in Rails!
All the coaches take their students through the same tutorial. It’s well structured and slowly builds on the core concepts, enabling students can quickly build something tangible which they can then extend in their own time. With two students per coach it makes the coaches job really easy, and gives the students space to learn by doing rather than merely cutting and pasting code. Rails is a great framework for a workshop like this since it’s so easy to get something up and running.
Shortly before lunch we stopped for lightening talks. Ella, one of our Engineering Managers at Bloom & Wild gave a great talk on what new starters should look for when choosing a new company or role. There were other great talks on subjects such as code reviews and experiences of being a junior developer; subjects that are important as students take their first steps into a career in coding.
After lunch we then spent the afternoon with the students, coaching them to build new functionality into their apps, adding gems, changing design elements and teaching them about version control
At 5pm we’d reached the end of a tiring but inspiring day and it was time to wrap-up and give the students advice on where they could go next and how they could carry on their coding journey. It was great to see how much people had learnt in a day, both students and coaches, and the dedication and interest from the students was wonderful to see.
RailGirls provides a brilliant opportunity to give something back to the community, encourages an under represented group in technology, and it’s also great for those of us who’ve been in technology for a while to train others. No-one really knows something until they can teach it to someone else, and it’s important to remember what it was like when you were just starting out. It’s not just the students who are doing the learning.
Massive thanks 🎉 to the whole team behind Rails Girls for another excellent event, thanks to Simply Business for hosting and all the other sponsors as well, and coaches and students for what was a great day. We’ll be back next year, hopefully we’ll see you there.
