Woooow! I am coding already!

This is a guest post from Alexandra for vorarlberg.digital on her RailsGirls Workshop experience which I led for Digitale Initiativen.

You have to learn coding! — that my friend always repeats me — It makes your life easier! Maybe Facebook heard this and suddenly I got RAILSGIRLS as suggested event in my feed. I applied immediately and on Friday, 28 of April I was sitting at Gelbe Fabric and installing software for Saturday’s workshop. While waiting for the “welcome” pizza, we started to do some Ruby exercise… Woooow! I am coding already! At the moment everything looks easy, intuitive and logical. Let’s see how it will be tomorrow.
Next day we started with nice breakfast and short overview of basics done by Christoph. Then we literally jumped into Ruby on Rails. Learning by doing! Couple of minutes and….. I created my first simple web page with Ruby on Rails. Honestly, it was the easiest part. Then we looked closer how actually dynamic web pages work. Following guide on RailsGirls page, we got deeper and deeper into programming with support of our coaches. From one side everything is simple and clear, from other side it was a lot of new knowledge that we had to consume during only one day. Especially for me, who don’t have much experience in programming or web design. In second part of workshop Johannes gave us some highlights about user experience and life hacks how to build it easily. At the end we hosted our pages and was proud of ourselves!

This day was intense. However it was cool to figure out that “omg, I am coding! And it is not so complicated”. The coaches gave us a lot of support, and step-by-step guides on RailsGirls web page and hang outs helps us to keep practicing.
Perhaps it was too fast, we had no time to go into details about particular points for better understanding. For me a bit interaction with girls was missing too.

Of course one day workshop: to learn how to code is not enough. But to get the first insight of Ruby on Rails and programming in general it was great. I guess the most important things: now we know that coding is not soooo complicated and every girl can do!