About a week ago, we held Railsbridge Sacramento at Hacker Lab. It was Emmanuel and I’s first time organizing such an event and I think we can honestly say it was a huge success. When I first heard about Railsbridge, I began to pour through the curriculum at each level to look at the didactic structure of the lessons and realized that this was an incredibly effective way to start people out in Rails.

The intro curriculum is very well written when one considers that the audience is someone who isn’t familiar at all with writing anything for the web or using a command line to run a server. For many of our attendees, getting the intro curriculum up and running and then making slight modifications was enough of an ‘A-Ha’ moment that it satisfied the goal of getting attendees to leave having accomplished something. For those not challenged enough by the intro curriculum, the intermediary curriculum gives enough of a challenge that you learn more of the central rails concepts, but not so challenging that you couldn’t complete it in one Railsbridge session!

Our volunteer team was so instrumental to the entire event going off without a hitch. From following the guidelines of attendee interaction to helping clean up after the event, I really felt honored to work with such amazing people. Huge thanks to Catlyn, Dalton, Ed, Gary, Thomas, Will, Travis, and Ben. Of course, another huge thanks has to be awarded to Emmanuel for convincing me to run this with him, as I think it solidified in me the power of bringing the Ruby community out to interact with those interested in the world of web development!

Hoping we can run another in the future as I sure see the value in the experience!