Prelude To Innovations in Motion

Today was the first of two days of Workshop For Good, which is a "cheap" Ruby on Rails workshop with a few big names in the Rails community that is basically a multi-thousand dollar fund raiser for a school in DC (not a real public school, but a charter school, so I guess it is all in the same system, so I can live with that). After a bewildering morning getting there, frustration of trying to navigate through my city, I finally made it there an embarrassing twenty minutes late.

I got there, and it felt really nice to be iin a small setting learning about this stuff. I had read through a book about it, done the test things, even made a mostly-workable web app, but I didn't really have any foundation, context, or principles to go by with it. I didn't really know Ruby, however I was using to create web apps. I wanted to learn about new things that I would have to sort through many different articles to find a concrete answer.

It was informal with teacher Jeff starting off with a great opening monologue, explaining why we were here, what he does, how he got into Rails, and junk like that. Then Amy Hoy got up and talked about Rails somemore. Then Ezra talked and typed at the same time about Ruby and Rails. And then, around 2, maybe, we finally started doing some coding. And that was great, I was not looking for the same blog tutorial I have done a few times. I wanted to get a more rounded idea of what Rails was. And the first day definitally did that for me.

I got a free copy of Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (The Facets of Ruby Series) (my second, but this copy has never been to the bathroom, yet) which is awesome. Maybe I will win something tomorrow, like a t-shirt!