DorkShop #2: Ruby on Rails [part 1]

What: Introduction to Ruby on Rails
When: Friday, March 6th, 12:00 to 03:00 pm
Where: Parsons Paris, 45 rue Saint-Roch, 75001, room 500
Who: Emily Reese

~1 hour: Ruby on Rails installation. We’ll be following these instructions step by step:http://guides.railsgirls.com/install/. Everything should be pretty straightforward, but I’ll be there for questions if people hit weird errors.

~30 min: introduction to important concepts to be used in the course like text editor, terminal, and the browser. We’ll go over simple terminal commands like `cd`, `ls`, and `telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl` to get people comfortable on the command line.

~1 hour and a half: the first bit of Ruby on Rails nitty gritty. We’ll briefly discuss the difference between “Ruby” and “Ruby on Rails” then will create our first Rails project and introduce the concept of a “post” (a post migration, model, controller, and views). In doing so, we’ll discuss data structures and the components of MVC (model – view – controller) patterns. We’ll also mess around with the automatically generated HTML and CSS because style changes always give instant satisfaction.

Emily Reese is a full-time Ruby on Rails engineer in New York City who, after studying art in college and graduate school, learned that code can be the solution to many art world problems. She’s worked for startups big and small, but her real love is teaching programming to creative people who use technology for amazing things. She’s on Twitter as @eclairereese.