Gearing Up for the Ruby on Rails Workshop
It’s been more than six months since I’ve decided to deliver a Ruby on Rails workshop. Emboldened by the very positive response to my introductory presentation on Ruby on Rails, I’ve zeroed in on the task of preparing the hands-on workshop on how to properly use Rails. The only problem for me was the logistics of the event. I really didn’t have the time to scout the location and to launch the marketing/advertising efforts.
My friend Nathaniel Brown came to the rescue. He took it upon himself, as a part of his Canada on Rails Conference push, to organize and promote the workshop. All the details are now aggregated on the Canada on Rails Workshop site. The workshop I’ll be teaching is Riding the Rails. It offers two full days of introductory hands-on exercises that will set you on the right path to using this revolutionary technology.
Why are We Doing This?
There are basically three fundamental reasons why we’ve decided to put so much effort into organizing and running these workshops. From the more prosaic to the more profound ones, they are:
- We have bills to pay, and would rather earn money by doing something we really, truly enjoy
- We would seriously like to contribute to creating a solid Rails community here in the Pacific Northwest region
- We are starting to get concerned about the you can write Fortran in any language syndrome that seems to be creeping into some Rails projects we’ve seen, and would like to prevent that from re-occurring
My rationale is that pretty much anyone can download some half-baked online tutorial on Rails, go through the steps and quite easily build Rails apps. But that’s not really going to do anyone much good, because what’s much more important than learning the kinetics of how to make Rails apps, is learning the heart, the soul, and the spirit of the Rails technology. There is a certain preliminary orientation, almost a religious conversion, that must happen before a person becomes a solid Rails developer. This orientation will be exposed during our workshop.
