This past December, a friend of mine, Peter, wanted to improve his rails skills. I had been asked by a few people about teaching some rails training sessions, but wanted to give it a beta test first. When I was in Toronto over the holidays, Peter and I gave it a trial run, which went great. Since then, I've been dying to offer ruby / rails training to a wider audience.
How It'll Work
The sessions will be based on the format that I tried out in my beta session with Peter. We'll start by covering some advanced rails fundamentals, with time for questions, and plenty of time to go off on long tangents about whatever you might want to learn (like, how to write a plugin, or how some of the rails internals work). The remainder of the session will be spent coding.
During the coding portion of the sessions, the instructor(s) will pair program with each of the participants in a rotation. Think of it as an opportunity to work extremely closely with a rails expert. We'll be able to apply what we've learned in the earlier portion of the session. We'll work on your real problems; that way, we'll be teaching a custom course that's custom tailored to you, and you'll walk away from the experience with some code, to boot!
Participants will be asked to bring two projects: one in progress (or finished), and one idea.
- The project in progress serves as a tool for analysis of where you're at, and what kind of coding practices you have in general. We'll work out some possible refactorings for that project, and talk about how you'd make use of advanced rails techniques to improve its readability, maintainability, etc.
- Next, we'll work on your project idea. The rest of the session will be spent architecting, and actually coding this project. We'll help you pick the right plugin set, model your data, and anything else.
Logistics
- I'd like to offer the first session some time in early July, most likely over a weekend.
- The sessions will be held in Montreal, unless there's a compelling reason to offer them somewhere else, like, a group of participants who all live in the same city.
- Price is still TBD; I've got some potential sponsors (which would offset the price for participants), but nothing confirmed yet. There would certainly be a discount for groups or companies.
Finally, I intend to keep the instructor to participant ratio extremely low to support plenty of one-on-one time. So, if there is sufficient interest, I'll get some of my fellow Montreal rails ninjas in as additional instructors. I've got some awesome people in mind. Who knows — you might even get scouted by one of the local rails shops!
If you're interested, send me an email (top right) for more info.
