Rails Girls Warsaw
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to participate as one of the organizers in an amazing event – the second edition of Rails Girls Warsaw.
Rails Girls is a 2-day event where women of all ages, most of them with no coding experience, are provided with the tools needed to learn Ruby on Rails and to make the tech world more woman-friendly.
Although at SoftwareMill we use Ruby on Rails less than Java and Scala, we strongly support the initiative and were happy to be part of it this time round.
phot. ARadzinska
This was already the second time that Rails Girls Warsaw was held at Centrum Prasowe Foksal – a wonderful villa right in the centre of Warsaw. Altogether, there were 43 participants, 13 coaches and speakers, and 5 organizers.
The aim of the workshops is to give women the opportunity to learn the basics of Ruby by creating their own application, to get inspired and last but not least, meet great people.
phot. ARadzinska
The learning part usually starts with tryruby.org, which serves as an introduction to coding and Ruby in general. After that, the participants start to code their own application. This time, this was a new app (prepared by our coaches and organizers) called ‘The suffragist’ that allows votes to be cast for different cities.
In addition to the coding exercises, lightning talks were presented by people already into IT and/or programming, with the intention of inspiring girls to develop further in this area.
There were a lot of very interesting talks. Just to mention a few – we heard a great talk by Magda Malinowska, who learned to code by herself about a year ago and is now working as a programmer. Staś Małolepszy from Mozilla told us a story about his cousins, aged 11 and 7, who made their own video game. And Ola Sitarska, after jokingly discouraging us from starting to code, admitted that it’s one of the greatest things you can learn.
phot. ARadzinska
The talks were a great opportunity not only to get inspired, but also to meet new people. And they weren’t the only such element. After the first day, we held a middle party in a club and there were a few breaks for getting to know each other during the workshops. There was even a break for some pilates training, which was a great way to relax our bodies and have even more fun.
This edition was slightly bigger than the first and we’ve changed the programme, but the energy was just the same as before. I really hope to have the chance to participate in a number of such events and also hope the initiative will turn into a long-term, continuous learning opportunity.
