The Impactory

1^st Rails Girls Luxembourg was successful!

A fun and friendly event above all!

 

The 1^st Rails Girls edition took place last week on Friday evening and Saturday in Luxembourg at the Impactory, a co-working place and business incubator at the heart of the city. Rails Girls was born in Finland in 2012, and already took place in more than 100 cities worldwide. The aim is to allow women to learn how to create websites and web applications.

The event gathered about 40 women (from 15 to 59), and 14 volunteer coaches (5 women & 9 men), passionate programmers, who were there to share their knowledge in programming.

The workshop was organised by Marina THIRIET from The Impactory and Claudine Kariger from Service des médias & communications, sponsor of the workshop.

During the weekend, the coaches made an analogy between cooking and programming, which allowed the attendees to better understand the ‘recipe’ to create an app.

 

Creating an app only in few hours!

Far from being a formal training, a variety of activities were offered to the participants with presentations and practical activities. The participants were able to try programming with simple exercises and then later create a web app at their own pace.

The workshop was available in Luxembourgish, English and French. The attendees, beginners and advanced programmers, were introduced to Ruby, an open source computer language created in 2004 which has become very popular supported by a  large community.

 

The attendees were also there to meet new people and see the event as a networking opportunity: ‘I’ve got a great app idea, but I don’t know how to create it’ or ‘I’m working within an IT team, I’m the only girl and I would like to communicate better with my colleagues”

 

‘I am very impressed with the active role that the Luxembourgish Government is taking towards encouraging the female population to broaden their technical horizons. So much lasting goodwill and cohesion came to life during such a short frame of time.

Learning programming has always been on my list of things I would like to learn and it couldn’t have happened at a better time or better place.

If you care to read a brief blog post about the Rails Girls Workshop, I invite you to consult the latest posting on my blog : yvonnekoechig.com
’ – said Yvonne.

 

Happy attendees and new events are likely to happen

Some women already planned to meet each other again, in order to continue working on projects and learn further. Several coaches, who met each other during the event,  got along very well and are now planning to offer new activities to raise awareness of IT for the public: they will of course be welcomed at The Impactory!

We received 80 applications, had to choose the 40 women and selected the most highly motivated.