First Post

30 Oct 2013

For my first post I decided to go big and write about the thing that has had the biggest impact on my development as a developer (expect alliteration, anticipated audience), the first Rails Girls Atlanta event I attended.

Rails Girls is an international group that hosts open-source Ruby on Rails workshops, primarily geared towards teaching women but everyone seems to be welcome. Unfortunately I missed the full workshop for Atlanta but the event had been so successful they turned it into a monthly meetup which I’ve attended since I found about it.

I find out about Rails Girls Atlanta through the ATL Ruby User Group. At the very beginning of the meeting a girl stood up & mentioned that there was an upcoming Rails Girls Meetup and anyone who was interested in learning Ruby on Rails should attend.

I didn’t have my laptop (for whatever reason I went to a computer/web programming interest group meeting without a device on which to program) so I couldn’t even google this to find out what it was. It sounded like somewhere I needed to be though, so I wrote it down in my pink notebook like a web-developing Elle Woods.

On the day of the Rails Girls meeting, I sat down in the first of a very few rows of chairs & a girl sat down beside me who told me she was learning just becaused she thought it was cool. During the meeting, there was a presentation on an error handling method that was way above my head and then some of the other attendees showed off their homework. One of the girls showed hers & said “I wasn’t really sure what I was doing but I think I did it right, this is what I got”. She downplayed her work but what we all saw was a working to-do list application (apparently this is the “Hello-World” of apps). She explained some of the dependencies and the steps she took to create the app (seemingly very few, it’s that easy? News to me!) and talked through the errors she was getting.

After the homework show & tell, which I promised myself I would participate in as soon as I figured out how, everyone stayed to chat. I will admit, by this time I was a little intimidated by the other attendees. Many of them had written at least one web app (I was still struggling with git), most of them had slick macbook air laptops with cool stickers on them (the only stickers on my laptop were pieces of tape holding the cover-plate for recently installed ram in place) and all of them seemed comfortable talking RoR in casual conversation. Everyone seemed so confident and qualified I was nervous to talk to them, but they were all smiling and asking me if I wanted more tacos, so I forced my nervousness down and approached a small group.

They were so nice!

After some brief introductions, and telling them how glad I was to have found such a group I asked them how they got involved with Ruby on Rails. One of them spoke up and surprised me, “actually until recently I was a [insert unrelated profession here], I came to the Rails Girls workshop & started teaching myself.”

Wow, that’s amazing, she just said “I’m going to do that” and then she did it.

I told her all of that & she surprised me again “You should try the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial, it’s really easy to follow and it teaches you everything you need to know and at the end you have written a working twitter clone. You seem smart, it shouldn’t be too tricky but you can always get help online.”

AMAZING. This encouraging, open environment full of people learning just because they like it was a new experience for me, and I loved it. Armed with a serious plan to learn RoR and freshly minted self-confidence I drove home that night emboldened & excited.

It’s been several months since that first meeting and I’ve had some setbacks but I’ve never once doubted myself since. Through the Atlanta Ruby User Group & Rails Girls Atlanta I met people who didn’t think it was lame that I liked coming home from work & coding all night, people who were learning because they liked to always be learning. I met people who wanted to help people like me become people like them, and I knew I was in the right place.

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