This weekend I participated in the second (semi annual, hopefully) Rails Girls Houston event and it was an absolute blast.

For those of you not familar with Rails Girls, this is what went down.

Friday evening the attendees can show up and let us help them get everything installed. This allows us to focus completely on coaching them through the actual coding all day Saturday instead of having to deal with the setup process.

At the beginning of the event on Saturday we did an “intro to the internet” that involved a kitchen and a cherry pie. I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks.

Then we broke up all the girls¹ up into groups of 3-5 and the “coaches” guided them along their route to awesomeness.

I should explain a little bit about what a “coach” is. We’re not really instructors (although my group asked some really great questions and I did end up lecturing for quite a while). The girls have a little booklet that walks them through the steps of pulling down a git repository, running bundler, and starting the rails dev server.

Really all I was there for was to trouble shoot and explain concepts (wtf is MVC).

Here comes the interesting part, however:

I Know Diddily Shit About Rails

And that’s cool! I know just enough ruby, erb, and how things should look to get by. The cool thing about these Rails Girls events is that it’s great for the coaches too. I got a refresher on some MVC concepts, and got to see how easy it is to get things going in Rails.

If you are interested in participating in a Rails Girls event near you, checkout http://railsgirls.com. If you’re intersted in participating in the next one in houston (either as a coach or attendee) feel free to email me.

Bonus Picture

Of me in a chef’s hat immediately after hitting Paul in the face with a plate of whipped cream.