Event Report: Rails Girls Pune (January 2016)
I recently attended the Rails Girls Pune event at Thoughtworks, Pune. You may be wondering why I was at a women-only event, but there’s a bit of a story behind.
CBT Nuggets online course had recently sparked my interest in Ruby and during the same time, I got to know about the event from Walchand User Linux Group. Thus I was eager to participate but it was Rails “Girls” Pune, a women-only event, and requirement was to come as a team of two, with at least one member being a woman. I attempted to find female partner from my class to attend event with me but most of them refused to participate somehow.
However, I really wanted to attend the event because it was going to be my first hackthon experience and this events used to happen only once a year. So I decided to shoot an email to the organizers explaining my problem and to my surprise, they allowed me to participate with a male-friend. Naturally, I asked my roommate and we decided to attend the event on January 30th, 2016 at Pune.
As we walked into the event, I couldn’t help but feel a little out of place as we were only two male-attendees. But the organizers were incredibly welcoming, and I quickly felt like a part of the community.
The event started with an overview of Ruby and Rails, including its history and the stories of its creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, and Linda Liukas, a popular author from the Ruby space.
After the introduction, attendees were divided into groups, given mentors and tasked to brainstorm on project ideas to work on. Our group of two had three mentors - Paritosh Botre (person on the right with red t-shirt), Swapnil Chincholkar (guy in the middle), and Dipsi Takkar (lady on the left side).
We decided to create our first mini blog application and each mentor brought unique technical expertise and personalities to the table. Paritosh and Swapnil were developers and Dipsi was product manager in Josh Software, Pune. Paritosh had a strong focus on the industry use of Ruby syntax, Swapnil had a great understanding of the backend of Rails, and Dipsi helped us with project ideas. We spent approximately 2 hours creating the design and foundational functionality for a blog, such as ability to write posts and display content.
Afterwards, we took a short break for snacks. Our mentors introduced us to their friends and gave us a tour of the office, which included a big truck and auto rickshaw inside. We heard stories about how Thoughtworks managed to bring these relatively big vehicles to the 6th floor of the building, which was quite amusing (as you may have guessed, they used cranes to pull vehicles on 6th floor during building contruction, so “thoughtful”).
After the break, we had an additional 2 hours to complete the code, host it on Heroku and give a presentation in front of the attendees. During presentation, we saw attendees came up with very creative ideas. One of the organizer even demostrated how he could create a Twitter clone on stage within 10 minutes to showcase the capabilities of Rails.
We also presented our mini blog along with our mentors.
At the end last, Gautam Rege, co-founder of Josh Software, shared his personal story about how he got started with Rails and how he co-founded the company, and it was quite inspiring.
The overall experience was fantastic, and I came to realize that it’s important to step out of one’s comfort zone in order to learn something new. That’s exactly what I did, I learned a lot from the Rails Girls Pune event, met many new people and had a great time even after all the awkwardness. :)