by co-organizer Louie Zamora (@xharuhix)

We held the first Rails Girls workshop in Nara on March 14 and 15 of 2014. On the first day, our goal was to give the participants a taste of Ruby and Rails by having them install these packages on their machines.

Since it was the first for everyone to meet in person, we also had a bit of introduction during dinner and to also officially open the workshop. Everyone, including the volunteers, was a bit shy at first but got a bit comfortable after everyone has eaten. They would probably be much more comfortable the next day when everyone has to work closely with one another. 

The first day ended well with the majority of the participants successfully installed Ruby and Rails on their own machines and probably found new friends.

On the second day, everyone had coffee, tea, and some snacks first thing in the morning, as we didn’t want anyone hungry while learning new stuff. After some formal introductions, we’ve had all participants separate into working groups to learn Ruby on Rails by the official Rails Girls guide.

Then lunch break came and everybody had to move again to Sentan guesthouse and came back to L3 an hour later. So we did the workshop up until 3PM to listen to the lightning talks. We’ve had Karn introduce Thai Students Association in Japan (TSAJ) to everyone, Satomi-san talked about Ruby organization in Kansai, and Yuma-san gave tips to everyone how Ruby on Rails can be useful in real-life. Lastly, we had the lovely Linda on Google Hangout to give some inspiring speech about Rails Girls. On that note, we were simultaneously doing the workshop with girls in Russia and Turkey (?) oooh~global!

Time flew by so fast that we’re nearly ending the workshop with an otsukaresama dinner with everyone. On that same day, it was actually Keiko-san’s birthday (tip from Aki-san) so we wished her well with a birthday song. I knew later on that it was also one of the participants’ birthday, Yosuke-san (happy birthday to you too!).

We ended the workshop with smiles and new friends and hopefully with motivation to continue on learning not only Ruby on Rails but also all other things associated with it. We held the workshop not only to teach Ruby on Rails but also to enlighten girls with engineering and computer science that it is not at all complicated but in fact, it can be fun too! 

To cap this up, thank you to all those who participated, volunteers and attendees alike, and to our sponsors and supporters ^_^ \m/

P.S. Thanks to Gian and Aki-san for the photos :)