A couple of months ago when Damon Clinkscales asked if I’d participate in a local training session for new Rails developers, I jumped at the opportunity. I really enjoyed my time as a speaker for the Rails Edge conferences, and, regardless of how stressful it is, there’s few things as satisfying as watching someone get Ruby and Rails right in front of your eyes.

Rails BootUp was born, and this last Saturday Damon, Edward, Mike, Rob, myself, and a class of 11 spent the day at Datran Media’s offices talking about Ruby and Rails. It was fun… and there was some mighty fine catering, courtesy of Damon’s excellent taste in local restaurants.

Why we did it

So, backing up a bit… why teach a small Rails course here in Austin?

To put it plain and simple, it was to help build up the local Ruby community. While Austin is a pretty fair sized IT corridor, our Ruby and Rails groups are still in the fledgling stage; there seem to be a large number of local developers (many of them working with Java) that seem poised on the fence, interested in Ruby but without the skills or understanding they feel necessary to take the leap.

This course, from my perspective, was designed in part to introduce a new group of developers to the language— and to test the waters to see if a demand for Ruby training exists in the local area. As fast as the event sold out, I think we have our answer.

We also donated over $400 to Austin Children’s Shelter, which isn’t half- bad!

It went pretty well

I think we had a solid progression of lessons throughout the day; from Rob’s thorough introduction to the Ruby language itself all the way to Damon’s talk on Capistrano (where attendees actually deployed their own code to separate Dreamhost configurations).

My talk on ActionPack— explaining how requests become responses and how views are structured— seemed to go off well, though this is definitely a set of topics that should be broken out to several focused talks in later manifestations of the Rails BootUp. As with any training course— especially one being done for the very first time— there is plenty of room for improvement in future events.

Salutations

We sure did meet a great group of inquisitive, bright developers. Welcome, and keep in touch!