Last weekend I coached at a Rails Girls event in Galway, Ireland. The event was being held just up the road from our main office, and since OnePageCRM is built on Ruby on Rails, it felt like an ideal way to get in touch with a local community of existing and potential Rails developers.

The Rails Girls movement was born in Finland a few years back and now has branches all around the world. The aim is to provide tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas. The Galway even has been running for the past three years and this year saw nearly 60 participants and coaches assemble.

Saturday morning started off with the participants all installing an Ubuntu Virtual Machine on a variety of laptops of all conditions and ages!

Time for a quick tea break

After a few talks introducing the session, the team got stuck into creating their first Rails application.

Some participants had more experience than others, and it was great to see everyone working together to help each other through the tutorials.

By Sunday evening, all of the participants managed to have their first rails app up and running locally and some managed to deploy them to Heroku. Well done to everyone.

I really enjoyed my coaching role and it was great to meet so many enthusiastic developers and coaches. I hope the Rails Girls movement thrives in Galway as there is a great community of interested developers. Maybe next time I’ll convince some of the rest of the OnePageCRM team to get involved.