Helsinki Girls Get Coding In A Post- Women’s Day Frenzy

Rails Girls Helsinki ran its 5th edition of the workshop on March 8-9 at Startup Sauna. Our group of 55 participants and some 15 coaches and organizers kicked off the weekend in a festive mood with some International Women’s Day sparkling.

On Saturday morning we gathered over a nice breakfast spread, courtesy of the cool folks at Futurice. Shortly the day got started with lightning talks by Joni Kanerva from Devlab and Emilia Mattila from Eficode, Satoko Hinomizu from Futurice.

After that is was coding as usual. We were lucky to have a mix of new and old coaches - some have been coaching in Helsinki since the very first Rails Girls!

Here’s Markku Roto, aka Zorcam running a TryRuby.org warmup like the seasoned RG coach he is!

“Who here is a Rails Girl?! Show of hands everybody!”

In the afternoon, Lauri Hynynen presented some handy tools for building websites.

• With Backlift, you can get your newly created website live right away and start sharing it with friends. The files are put on your Dropbox and the site is automatically updated as you make changes, so you don’t have to worry about git, Heroku or other advanced tools.
• Another nifty trick is using Google Chrome’s “Inspect Element”, to better understand structure of HTML. To try it out, just right click on any website and choose “Inspect element”.

Ladies, a challenge for your followup exercise: use these tools to learn HTML and build your own portfolio site!

Lauri also made a starting template for to be used with Backlift, check it out from here.

Once again, it was a splendid day. Thanks to our sponsors Eficode, Futurice, Devlab, Teknologiateollisuus and the Ministry of Transport and Communications as well as all coaches, speakers and participants who showed up!

Note also that we have a follow-up event on March 26th - come one, come all, it’ll be a great chance to share our post-workshop thoughts and feelings!

• More photos from the event here
  
• Read about the event in Finnish
  

Photos: Yu Shen

Rails Girls Helsinki 18-19.5.2012

Rails Girls Helsinki last week was the third time we organised an event in Helsinki. Some of our organizers were the very same people who participated in the first event 1,5 years ago. After that we’ve given over 120 finnish girls the first experience into software craftsmanship and hope to see the movement expand in unforeseen directions. 

Thank you goes once more to our coaches - mighty 16 of them! - for volunteering as well as for Aalto University for sponsoring the show.  People often ask what happens in Rails Girls events, who are the participants and such, so I decided to put together a short picture show. 

Now that we are this many in Finland - let us know in the comments how to keep on moving forward with the Helsinki community. You can always join the global team mailing list, but other than that, we are open to suggestions? Should we do a picnic coding event in June? What about organizing something around a specific theme? 

Over 60 participants learned the basics of web building during two days. 

And it’s fun! Not a staged picture - promise!

One of our new add-ons were the Ruby tattoos with which you could declare your love for unicorns, rubys, octocats and the command line poetry. Where we got them? It’s a secret we’ll never tell, XOXO. 

Also in program the old favorite from Frozen Rails: the Rails Girls Badges, hand crafted in Helsinki. 

Our youngest participants this time hailed from high-school! Very cool ladies. 

We had Oleg Podsechin from Helsinki.js telling about the world of programmers in a lightning talk. 

And the almost mandatory installation sparkling wines & macaroons. 

L’ambiance during the evening. 

Coaches keep on coaching - here some of them starting with Timo.

Hanne

Timo again

Tair & Vesa

And Arttu (running into something unexpected)

Big reason to attending for many is to meet other likeminded women both in Finland…

..and abroad. Here we did a quick “HIIII!” with the Berlin Rails Girls group who hosted their own event at the same time. 

Lunch was served outside as well

One thing that is always certain, is that Rails Girls requires absolute concentration. It was amazing to see yet again people continuing until late in the evening working. When we tried suggesting to have something to eat, go watch the ice-hockey game or enjoy the weather, the avid participants just wanted to keep on coding.

Since probably the best moments are when something magical, almost serendipitous happens, things click and you get something you built with your very own hands to work. 

Over and out,

- LL