by co-organizer Yoko Harada
The very first chapter in Japan, Rails Girls Tokyo, made a great success. When attendees left the room, their eyes were shining. When coaches left the room, they were smiling with satisfaction. Although the way to the workshop wasn’t easy, Rails Girls Tokyo Team could make a great step to encourage ladies to code.

Rails Girls Tokyo – the idea came upon in my mind when I learned Linda Liukas and Terence Lee would speak at Sapporo RubyKaigi 2012, where I was also a speaker. When I firstly contacted Linda, I didn’t know much about the workshop. At first, I planned to open the workshop alongside of Sapporo RubyKaigi, but it turned out very hard for various reasons. So, I moved the place to Tokyo and a week before the Sapporo RubyKaigi.

Tokyo was the best place to organize the first Rails Girls event. Many of Rails developers in Japan are in Tokyo area. Finding good coaches was easy. Also, finding a free meeting room for the event was easier than in Sapporo. Actually, Rails Girls Tokyo had the best coaches in Japan. Most of coaches were speakers at Sapporo RubyKaigi as well as other conferences including RailsConf. Some of coaches are authors of Ruby books or organizers of local Ruby communities. Also, the meeting room at COOKPAD was perfect for this sort of event. It was a beautiful and cozy room, and to my surprise, have a big kitchen on the other side. COOKPAD offered free coffee and water. Two coaches from COOKPAD, Takai-san and Murata-san, cooked bagels for all in the morning of the workshop. Of course, the room had a high-speed Internet access with SSL upstream.

Got the awesome coaches and the perfect room, Rails Girls Tokyo set out to make the workshop happen. However, organizing the event wasn’t easy since everyone including me have never been to Rails Girls event. I barely had an idea through my experience of volunteering at RailsBridge in JRubyConf 2012, Minneapolis. I started reading “The How To Guide” carefully while translating it into Japanese. Yes, translating all documents of Rails Girls Guide was our job since Japanese people are not good at English. The guide gave me a clear understanding about the event. The guide is really, really helpful. I repeat this, just following the guide makes the event successful.

“Just following the guide will make success “ was what I learned every time I encountered the problems. For example, choosing the attendees was. Choosing attendees is always a tough decision. It was true especially in our event. Huge number of applications rushed to Rails Girls Tokyo right after opening a subscription site. We had to close the subscription only in three days, unless, we would have too many applications unable to choose. After closing subscription site, I started that hard job, eliminating the applicants. The answers of two questions: “do you have any previous background in coding” and “why would you be a good participant for Rails Girls” did the job. These two questions are on the Rails Girls Guide. Looking at the answers and following the guide, I cut out people who seemed to be male applicants, likely had higher skills to be participants, or didn’t respond to our questions. This ended up in a good selection.

Following the Rails Girls Guide, we had an installation fest on Friday evening with Friday hug. Not many poeple knew what was “friday hug” when we took this picture.

Then, we tried workshops, bentobox modeling, lightning talks, and others on Saturday. All coaches acclaimed documents of Rails Girls were well organized and well practiced. Just following those made a Rails app run easily. Ladies did well from the beginning to uploading their apps to Heroku. When they saw their app running on Heroku, some took a picture of their screens, while others shared the link with friends. Occasionally, they had troubles, but coaches well assisted to solve them.

We didn’t get into a big trouble, but I’d pick up two troubles most of us had. Those were installation related and uploading Heroku. Many of OSX users didn’t have gcc installed, which caused JSON gem installation failure. So, coaches restarted from installing XCode. Probably, Rails Grils Tokyo Team will use RailsInstaller for OSX, too. Since RailsInstaller installs gcc at the same time, it looks easier to use for those who are not familiar with XCode.
Another problem was exactly the one described in Heroku and Rails 3.2 asset:precompile error . Fixing these, attendees could successfully deploy their app on Heroku.

Other troubles many had experienced were database migration. When they modified the app, they often forgot to perform database migration especially on Heroku. The error message was not helpful for beginners in this case, so people got confused what they should have done.

Our workshop went very well for all except one participant. She brought a bit old Windows laptop. It looked ok by some time of the afternoon. But, suddenly her laptop got freeze. When the laptop stared working after a couple of rebooting, the laptop didn’t have anything she worked on that day. She had to start from installation again. It was so sorry for her. Prior to the workshop she asked me about a machine spec available to use for the workshop. The trouble was caused not by CPU/memory but available disk space. It was unpredictable beforehand; however, I should have advised about that since a newer laptop has more disk spaces in general.

Something not in the Rails Girls Guide was how to collect money from sponsors. Business culture varies country to country, also company to company. Some companies said ok to transfer money to my personal account, but others didn’t. Our co-organizer, Kakutani-san, helped such a case. He is one of directors of Ruby-no-Kai(Japan Ruby Group), which is a nonprofit organization and helps Japanese Ruby communities technically and financially. The organization issued invoices to some companies on behalf of Rails Girls Tokyo, and would receive money from and issue receipts to them.

The Ruby-no-Kai will keep involving in future Rails Girls events all over Japan. Since the organization has established strong bonds to Japanese Ruby communities, Rails Girls events will have a stable backup.

Right after the Rails Girls Tokyo, we had amazing responses. All of them were positive ones. For example, our female coach was so deeply impressed by participants’ earnest attitudes that she created facebook group “Rails Girls Tokyo, More!” Also, the coaches and attendees have blogged about the workshop. Below is a list of links to those (all written in Japanese):

• http://www.hsbt.org/diary/20120908.html#p01
• http://www.ey-office.com/blog_archive/2012/09/10/rails-girls/
• http://kakutani.com/20120908.html#p01
• http://uniq.heteml.jp/blog/2012/09/08/rails-girls-tokyo-2012-1/
• http://yuca.hateblo.jp/entry/2012/09/10/210646
• http://s-kic.hatenablog.com/entry/2012/09/07/233000
• http://ameblo.jp/tryal/entry-11349277450.html
• http://somali.haun.org/windfall/
  
  

Our success encouraged people and led them to organize Rails Girls events in their cities. Rails Girls Kyoto has just started working and seeking a good date and venue at this moment. Rails Girls Sapporo’s possible organizers started talking about the event during Sapporo RubyKaigi. A small ripple raised in Tokyo is spreading to all over Japan as if it becomes a big wave.

We sincerely thank sponcsors of Rails Girls Tokyo. At first, we faced a lack of money and were unable to cover expenses of after party. We’ve already cut coach dinner, so we had little hope to make the after party free even for coaches. I emailed and spreaded the words hoping to get more sponsors. That paid. In the end, Rails Girls Tokyo got many sponsors and good financial supports.
We created T-shirt and covered fees for all participants of the after party. Absolutely, all attendees, coaches, staffs, and organizers enjoyed the party.

Finally, Rails Girls Tokyo team had a meetup on September 15th at Sapporo RubyKaigi. It was with Linda Liukas and Terence Lee. We all were exited to have them. As I wrote, most of coaches of Rails Girls Tokyo were speakers there. Almost all coaches showed up to the meetup in Sapporo. Also, people who were interested in Rails Girls event joined us. We enjoyed talking about what went good and what we should have improved.

Rails Girls Tokyo made the first great step. This is because of excellent Rails Girls documents. We thank all who worked previous Rails Girls events and put their knowledge and experiences in the documents. Also, I thank all who worked for Rails Girls Tokyo. Absolutely, Rails Girls is awesome. It inspires people.