Hello all! I have been talking with some of the RailsBridge group in San Francisco for a while with an eye toward launching a San Diego workshop. The time has come!
RailsBridge runs one and a half day workshops with a focus on reaching out to Women in Technology. The announcement for the SF version sums it up well: In this workshop, we'll take you through building a complete web application using Ruby on Rails. By the end of the workshop, you'll have an application on the internet that connects to a database and reads and writes information. We'll meet up Friday night to install all of the software you need, and then spend workshop day learning and writing code. Total programming novices, system administrators, developers in other languages, and folks who attended our previous workshops are all welcome. We'll have [a few] different classes separated by experience level. Each participant needs to bring his or her own computer. This workshop is intended to reach out to women who are new to Ruby and Rails. To register, you must identify as a woman. Men, you are welcome to come if you find a woman who wants to learn Ruby and Rails who will register and bring you as a guest. The workshop will be March 8th (starting at 6pm) and 9th (starting at 9am) at CoMerge, located downtown. Friday evening is a mandatory "InstallFest" where students, with help from teachers and volunteers, get their laptops ready with a working Rails dev environment. The workshop proper is all day Saturday. I'm posting looking for three things: sponsors, volunteers, and help reaching out to potential students. Sponsors: If your company, or one you have a connect to, might be interested in sponsoring us, solely or in part, please get in touch with me off list. While this is a volunteer effort, RailsBridge provides food and drink and, if needed, childcare, to students and volunteers. Costs will largely be determined by size of the class. In SF, they usually get very large classes of 70-80 students. I'm not expecting that here, but I think with good outreach, who knows? Volunteers: I think we have two and a half organizers (the "half" is not local), so that part may be covered, though help there is always welcome. We will need teachers, TA's, and general help with wrangling things. Much depends on the size of the class again, especially as for large classes, students break up based on experience, if any, and teachers and TA's are needed for each sub-group. Students: We also need help advertising this class. For students, there is no cost at all to attend. RailsBridge covers food and child care. There may be a cost to park downtown, but maybe we can figure something out if we have the budget. A typical first time RB student is a woman with some technical background, but is not a developer. In SF, many students are people who work in tech support or QA who are looking to get their feet wet on the dev side. However, this is highly variable! All are welcome, so they also get non-Ruby developers, systems administrators, as well as those who are not in tech at all. If you know individuals or groups who might be interested, please forward the student signup link: http://www.meetup.com/San-Diego-RailsBridge/events/100265752/ If you want to volunteer to help, please register your interest here (not for students!): http://www.meetup.com/San-Diego-RailsBridge/events/100266052/ Interested students should sign up here: http://www.meetup.com/San-Diego-RailsBridge/events/100265752/ Make sure you have a valid email on Meetup, as that's how we will be sending out the "real" sign up forms. AB -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
