Rails Girls Nairobi

I am on my way to the third Rails Girls Nairobi meetup and all I can think about its how this reality has come to being... I was shy to talk about the third day at Ruby Conference Kenya(in my last blog) because somewhere inside I was hoping it would turn out to be more than a day’s workshop. Well, I am already getting ahead of myself. Okay so, the second day of Ruby Conference 2017 I got to meet Joannah Nanjekye an organizer at Rails Girls Uganda and through our interaction she asked my friend(StellaMaris Njage) and I to help in a training in the Rails Workshop the next day.

The next day we held the workshop and a good number of curious minds showed up to get introduced to Ruby on Rails and web development basics. They were eager and seemed excited to learn the new language. When the day was over, we could feel a yearning from the learners that they wanted more and were fascinated by what they had accomplished in a day’s time. We had covered just enough to be able to create a simple blog post application but there was more to the framework than that. Also we felt that there might have been confusion since a lot of information and Ruby jargon was been channelled to the beginners to learn in a day.

Our main concern was how to maintain consistency and keep them motivated to keep learning this new language. So we decided to start a Rails Girls workshop in Nairobi. Two months later and with graceful help from Nairuby and Rails Girls Kampala, Rails Girls Nairobi was born. We have had three successful meetups so far.
We have introduced the members to version control using Git, have them understand the structure and syntax of Ruby and hopefully today we will be introducing Rails from a new angle.