The computer and the internet – two things we can’t imagine a day without. Many of us use it for work, others for education or entertainment. However, few users think about what or who is behind the monitor, creating the applications and programs we use every day. When we do think about it, we usually use the word “computer scientists” or “programmers”. But only a handful of insiders know what their job entails.
RailsGirls workshop on 4-5 October: a participant’s view
I’m personally one of those people who think about these things, so I took the chance to attend a free workshop by RailsGirls that was specifically for “programming laymen”. This event, as the name suggests, was aimed at the female part of the population. Initial fears that I would be the only one who couldn’t see programming from a moving train vanished with the arrival of the first coaches. The kind attitude and smile of each of them was absolutely disarming.
Workshop was scheduled for two days, namely Friday, October 4 and Saturday, October 5. On Friday, the actual installation of all the necessary files and programs, without which we would not have been able to program anything, was on the agenda. Although my computer at first wouldn’t load everything correctly and kept reporting errors, the skill of the coaches eventually won out and the computer stopped resisting. After the installation, the first lecture on HTML basics was given, and the biggest joy was the hiding of the “Dog List”. After a very enjoyable first evening, I went home excited and couldn’t wait to see what would happen the next day.
The Saturday programme started at 9am when we were welcomed and offered refreshments in the form of endless pots of coffee, water, tea as well as fruit, cakes, biscuits and other treats. After a hearty breakfast, we attended a lecture in which we learned about what we were going to experience and what we would be working with. At the end of the lecture we were given the task of demonstrating our theoretical knowledge by creating My Bentobox. This very hilarious combination of theory and practice then helped us a lot in the actual “coding”, which we spent the rest of the morning doing under the supervision of the coaches. A great advantage was that one coach was dedicated to a maximum of 3 participants, which guaranteed him individual time for all of them.
After lunch, we resumed creating a simple app that each of us customized in our own image. During the afternoon we were also visited by the owner of a sponsoring company and my boss, who told us how he worked his way up from being a college student to where he is today and explained his job description. This lecture was a great motivation for most of the participants, which was matched by the amount of questions that were asked afterwards. The rest of the afternoon was spent debugging our applications. At the end of the workshop, each participant received lots of small gifts and, among other things, a certificate of completion from RailsGirls.
I took away a tremendous experience from these two days. Firstly, I met a great bunch of inspiring, intelligent and friendly people, secondly, I got a glimpse into the hitherto so mysterious world of the programming “matrix”, and moreover, I created something that I want to develop further and work on. Thank you RailsGirls for making all this possible and I wish this workshop will be as successful in other cities as it was in Ostrava!