A Dude’s Review on Running a RailsBridge Workshop

Several months ago I put together a workshop focused on teaching women to code. I wanted to improve our male/female ratio for our local Ruby User Group, 757rb. Fortunately for me I had the resource of RailsBridge. RailsBridge is “an organization that works to increase diversity in tech by putting on a variety of awesome free events.” One of these events is a Ruby/Rails Workshop where we spend an evening and a day working through Ruby and Rails concepts.

The RailsBridge community is extremely helpful. They have guides that include the course curriculum, how to secure sponsors, and other things to consider when deciding to host an event. I was even approached by several members (thanks Mary Jenn and Desi) to help ensure that I was comfortable running the event.

Overall the event went well. We had six female attendees and all of them gave a score 6 or higher (on a 10 point scale) suggesting they would recommend the workshop to a friend (the average was 8.6). We haven’t seen a bump in our female attendance for 757rb but past attendees of the RailsBridge workshop have asked me when we’re going to throw the next one because they’ve been telling their friends about the workshop.

I want to thank Alicia Lauerman, Michael Buckbee, and John Dowd for helping out. Without them the event would not have been as successful as it was.

For me, I had a ton of fun. Seeing people achieve things they didn’t think they could is one of my ultimate highs. I’ve found that through teaching I’ve been able to vastly improved my ability as a developer (more on this in a future post). If you’ve been trying to figure out how you can give back to our awesome community you don’t just have to write code, you can teach. There are a ton of RailsBridge workshops to help out with.