El Blog de @la__Steph: The very first #RailsGirlsLima

The past weekend (April 13th & 14th) the first Rails Girls Lima took place, which consists on a two-day workshop that aims to immerse attendees to web applications programming using Ruby on Rails to accomplish learning objectives. Rails Girls is a technology movement born in Finland in 2011 and has been replicated on different countries ever since.

Rails Girls suggests that before making event official is preferred to have at least venue and date, 2 sponsor, 4 coaches and a github account. Venue was kindly provided by Gustavo Quiroz and Open Edge Technologies, coaches started pitching in as soon as the read the thread on Ruby Perú mailing list, and with sponsorships we did a little experiment with crowdfunding!

Application process was launched on March 26th. Registration for Rails Girls is kind of different from what we are used to, at first an application form has to be filled out that questions applicant about her/his level on programming skills and why he/she should attend workshop. This form allows organizers to give priority to female with little programming skills and this was really necessary given the fact that we only had room for 16 attendees. No worries about discrimination, 2 boys were invited =).

Day 1 was all about Installation, all attendees received help from our awesome coaches. Once all, participants had RoR and Sublime Text installed, Alvaro Pereyra gave an introductory sesssion on programming, for many girls it was the very first time to get hands on code!.
To close the day we enjoy some sodas and beatifull and yummy cupcakes and had some time to get to know each other.

Day 2 was a little bit busier than Day 1 so we started off with some good and healthy breakfast thanks to our kind collaborators.
During the first workshop coaches helped attendees to build their first app explaining details and key concepts along the way.
After our lunch break, we did the Bentobox activity which aims to related attendees with tech jargon and also explains how web apps work.
For the second workshop, attendees worked on teams with the objective to extend their web app, each team has the assistance of one coache. After 1h30min we were able to see some very nice and interesting applications. Each team chose a name and products as follow :

Aaasu: added video and comment to each idea registered.
Frutas: search by tags.
Awesome: image publishing and twitter integration.
PHP: added thumbs up/thumbs down voting for ideas.

Team Awesome

Team Aaasu

Team PHP

Team Frutas

We had a nice intervention from very strictly judges to select winning team, which was Aaasu Team :)

#RailsGirlsLima Judges @grubhart @quiroz_gustavo

To close the day, each coach and organizer presented a "lighting talk"

Karen gave some tips on How to go next on Rails/Ruby learning.
Pamela talked about GitHub and how it help us to work collaboratively.
Francesco invited us to collaborate on Open Source projects and pick one out of Ruby Perú repository.
Florent gave us an introduction on Heroku and steps needed to publish our app.
Pablo talked about how to overcome a bug and all the patience it needs :D
Me , I invited attendees to join Tech Communities, telling them how helpful and fun it is!

As our final activity we did a retrospective on the Workshop.
Attendees and coaches really liked the freedom to interact with each other which does not always happens on a Teacher-Student environment. Help was personalized so attendees felt very comfortable asking as many questions as they could and also coaches had the time to answer to each and everyone. We all felt very enthusiastic during the 2 days and how big was the wanting to learn feeling (which was huge!)
Something that didn't go that wall was our punctuality and assistance, we had come late comers and also no-shows =/

As improvements, we are committed to review guides, update them and translate them to Spanish :)