Free Ruby on Rails Workshop, Oct. 16-17
(Oof. I really haven’t posted this workshop yet. My apologies for the late notice.)
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Research on Computation and Society are facilitating a free Ruby on Rails workshop this weekend, October 16 and 17. Intended to be a supportive learning environment to encourage women in the software industry, men can register as the guest of a woman. Newbies are welcome. There is a discount with an in-home child care provider. Register through the blog post linked above.
Popular with developers, Ruby on Rails simplifies the programming of Web applications and should be a good first language for someone without programming experience. Knowing a programming language will only help librarians in these times. If you can’t figure out how to use Ruby in your job, learn a different language, like perhaps Python. I’ve heard from many programmers that learning languages becomes easier after they’ve learned one.
Addenda 10/15: The ladies running the workshop told participants it is full. I think there will be a webcast or some kind of audio archive. Information might be in the blog post linked above.
10/17: Webcast! IRC on freenode.net: #boston.rb -> Boston Ruby group’s channel, which they’re encouraging the participants to use today. Tweet hashtag: #rorw4w (In English: that’s the Twitter tag.)
And lots more notes~ That way you folks who don’t care about programming and what nifty tools like Ruby on Rails can do can easily skip this post.
Notes on downloading and installing the software are on the devChix wiki. Ruby and Rails require lots of pieces in order to work and to work together. One of the strengths is that they can sit on top of any database language. For the class, we’re using SQL. The sets of slides our instructor, Sarah Allen, uses are available via Slideshare and GitHub. There’s also a Ruby group on Google Groups. Supposedly, it’s safe to ask for help there. I can’t vouch for that because I haven’t posted on the list before. I’m in the beginner’s workshop.
Because I have Panther (Mac OS 10.3.9), my experience downloading and installing all of the software is different from a lot of other people’s experience. Apple has included Ruby as part of what comes with their machines since Leopard (10.5). I needed to snag git from a site other than that linked to from the wiki because those were all for more recent versions of Mac OSX. The One-click installer for Ruby didn’t work as I expected it to, so I ended up installing the various tars by hand. Thank you, JB, for taking the time several years ago to teach me how to do that when I needed to install mutt at work. Because of going through that experience, I knew to download the tar, find the README, INSTALL, or other file in the folder, and follow the instructions for installing the files. I became really good at ./configure, make, sudo make install, and so on. All together, it wasn’t too much yak shaving. I’ve been in situations before where each time I wanted to install software, I needed to grab another language or program or three. I use Terminal, Mac’s command window, all the time, so having to manually install the various programs wasn’t that horrible on its own. It was just mostly time consuming work between the downloads and waiting for the code to compile. If you have never had to install software that way, consider yourself lucky on some level, but I’ll say it’s very good knowledge to have. Luckily, there were rolling chairs, but unfortunately, the steps got in the way.
Sarah Allen and Sarah Mei, the ladies behind the workshop, both decided to do something about the gender disparity in the open source community. Sarah Allen, our workshop leader, talked about attending conferences regularly where there would be 6 women out of 200 total attendees. About 3% of the people in the open source developer community are women. The Sarahs would like that number to grow and see these workshops as a way to connect to women and encourage them to participate. The organizer at Berkman, Liana Leahy, admits when she attends tech gatherings, she often feels like she’s representing her gender more than being there as an equal.
In the class, we’re going to do some test driven development (writing code to address test plans) and agile programming.
Needed:
- ruby
- rails
- rake (make for ruby)
- git
- database (SQLite is what we’re using in the course, but it runs on top of many other ones)
- editor (Any editor should work. I’m using BBEdit because Komodo Edit (their suggestion) wasn’t working on my machine: the newest free version runs on a higher OS. After some digging, I found Komodo Edit 4.3.2 runs on 10.3.9, so I downloaded, installed, and began using it because it has better project management and Ruby visualization.)
- heroku (free rails hosting with some awesome project names)
During the intro, they asked for a show of hands as to who had programming experience. Most of my developer friends don’t consider anything of the dappling I’ve done to be real programming, so I kept my hand down. When Sarah was naming languages after that, she listed Basic. W00t! I’m finally somewhere where my past programming experience counts for something. 
Of course, she also listed COBOL, Pascal, and several other older languages no longer popular. Some of the older ladies raised their hands in response. That made me grin. We’re worried about gender disparities in programming now. Imagine what it was like 40 years ago.
