Saturday, 8th August 2015

RailsBridge

White October, 3 The Gallery, 54 Marston Street, OX4 1LF, Oxford

RailsBridge workshops are a free and fun way to get started or level up with Rails, Ruby, and other web technologies. Our events focus on increasing diversity in tech, so that people of all backgrounds can feel welcome and comfortable in our industry.

Agenda

09:30am

Arrive, drink coffee and eat pastries
10:00am

Start working
01:00pm

Lunch break!
04:30pm

Wrap-up

Please make sure you read and agree to our Code of Conduct before attending.

This workshop is intended to reach out to women who are interested in learning how to build interactive websites. Attendees should identify as a woman, and can bring a guest of any gender.

Interested in learning how to program? Never written a line of code before and are a little intimidated by nerds? There's no need to be! RailsBridge is a friendly place to get together and learn how to write some code.

Maybe you've written a little HTML and CSS before, or touched on Ruby or programming. Maybe you're completely new to this and ready for a challenge. All you need to attend is a laptop and enthusiasm (get in touch if you can't get hold of a laptop and we'll see what we can do).

We'll have some of the amazing people from New Bamboo (https://www.new-bamboo.co.uk/) on hand alongside the JSOxford and OxRUG volunteers, so there's plenty of help and mentorship available.

We'll have tea, coffee, snacks and drinks available throughout the day, as well as pastries in the morning and burritos for lunch. Please get in touch if you have any special dietary requirements and we'll sort you out.

We have two tracks: Frontend and Ruby on Rails. Programmers of all skill levels are welcome.

Ruby on Rails track

In this track we'll take you through building a complete web application using Ruby on Rails. By the end of the day, you'll have an application that connects to a database and reads and writes information. Even better, it'll be on the internet! You can see the activities for this track here (http://docs.railsbridge.org/docs/). Don't forget to come to the Friday InstallFest (see below).

Frontend track

The Frontend track is all about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We'll be building webpages, making them look amazing, and adding dynamic behaviour using JavaScript (click here (http://docs.railsbridge.org/frontend/) to see the course syllabus) The only thing you need for this track is a text editor and the web browser you already use! Please download and install a programming text editor (Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com/3) or Atom (https://atom.io/) are a good choice). Don't forget to come to the Friday InstallFest (see below).

Friday evening InstallFest

There's a lot to learn on Saturday, so it would be really helpful if everyone is set-up and ready to go. We'll meet up on Friday evening to install all of the software you need (or work through any problems you've had installing), and then spend Saturday learning and writing code.

If you can run through the InstallFest (http://installfest.railsbridge.org/installfest/) steps prior to attending that's also great. Even if you get stuck, please go through the rest of the instructions and download all the things you'll need. Bandwidth will be at a premium during the day, so it will help immensely to have everything on your laptop already.

Extras

We're always on the look out for new speakers to come and give a talk. If you have a talk that you'd like to present, please Submit a Talk and we'll contact you to arrange a date.

We are very keen to encourage new speakers. If you think you'd like to get into public speaking but don't know where to start please Get in Touch with us or take a look at our Speaker Resources. We'll do everything we can to develop your speaking skills.

Come and chat with us on Twitter or Slack. See videos of past events on our YouTube.