Rails Girls in Taipei

This is my lightning talk slide on RubyConf Taiwan 2014:

http://www.slideshare.net/aquarianboy/rails-girls-in-taipei

Hi, I’m Eddie, one of the organizers of Rails Girls Taipei. Last year, I went to RubyKaigi in Japan, and visited the Rails Girls event in Ruby Hiroba(広場). I found that the attendees were divided into “beginner” level and the other level which might be a little familiar with programming, and every coach take care 2 or 3 attendees, so they can coaching them one by one.

We thought it might be interesting if we can also have this event in Taiwan. So, Taian, Ryudo, and me, we three decided to host a Rails Girls event in Taiwan, just give it a try.

Our first event is on last September. We recruited about 10 to 15 coaches and discuss the detail, but we totally have no experience about this event.

We thought there won’t be any girl willing to join this kind of nerdy event. But surprisingly, there’re more than 300 girls signed up just in one day.

We eventually didn’t pick neither CS students or web developers, instead, we prefer those who are totally new to programming, we wanna see what will happen if we try to bring Ruby and Rails to them.

Looks like they all have a good time :)

And our second event is on last November. Still, more than 300 girls signed up again, and this time we recruited about 25 coaches and 75 attendees. You might have also noticed that, several coaches are also the speakers in conference this year.

you can visit here to see more photos. It’s awesome for me to see them open a terminal window and run some commands on they computer, it’s really cool.

Last month, we had the third event. Until now, we have more than 150 rails girls already.

Durning RubyConf Taiwan 2014, there are about 20 female volunteers in check-in counter or at the booths are from Rails Girls, they did help a lot in this conference.

Of course, you know, it’s not quite possible to learn Ruby on Rails just in a 2-day workshop, so some girls asked:”is there any other course to learn more?” Well, then we decided to have a weekly event for them, named “Let’s Try Rails Tuesday”, a.k.a “LTRT”. Which is mainly hosted by manic, also the speaker in this conference.

Currently, we’ve already had 16 LTRT events, and about 20 attendees per week, even in the rainy days.

Beside that, we also tried to do some promotions in high school or university, hope more people can understand what we were doing :)

Anyway, I have to thank all our coaches, it won’t work without your help.

We will have more Rails Girls event in the future if possible, so we'll need more coaches, please let me know if you’re interested in being a coach.

Of course, we need more sponsorship :)

At last, this is our fan page on Facebook, feel free to join us for more information. Please don't be hesitate to contact me if you have any question, any comment will be appreciated.