Rails Girls’ aim is to give tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas. It was born in Finland, but is nowadays a global, non-profit volunteer community.
The third edition of Rails Girls Brussels (second one organized by our current team) took place 2 weeks ago, on 30-31st May. Back in October, when it all started, I could have only dream about it 🙂

The format was the same as the previous time: we met on Friday @ Betacowork to install the software and Saturday for the workshop itself. On Friday all went pretty smooth and fast, especially since we learned our lesson last time: we had all the software on USB sticks so no lost time trying to fight for bandwidth. 😛
Saturday we started with registrations, a relaxed breakfast, followed by presentations and then just dived in exercises: Ruby try, Bentobox and Rails apps.
My first impression was we had to deal with a group that was a bit more mature, still girls who hadn’t had any connection with programming, but also girls who are actually working in the tech field, but just with different tools.

Although last time we had to say ‘no’ to more than 50% of the applicants, this time we had less applications, 48 to be more precise. Eventually 27 girls and 1 boy made it to the event. Yes,boys were accepted too, just that they had to bring a girl with them 🙂 Javi broke the ice and liked a lot our event, as I’ve understood.
All these participants were supported by 13 coaches, who first of all, gave up half of their weekend to be there and help. Moreover, Anne, a former participant from February’s edition, joined the organizing team which resulted in a 50% increase of the girl(s) 😛
Below you can see the testimonial of a participant. I strongly encourage you to check the full report here 😉

Promotion is a part we still need to work on, should you have suggestions on how to raise more awareness that such events exist, please let me know 😉
Giving that the work of all organizers and coaches is volunteered, we rely on sponsors’ goodwill to ensure a good quality of the workshop’s logistics. Therefore, a big thankyou for all those that said ‘yes’ to our campaign and supported us. Betacowork was actually the first one 😉
I will conclude by saying that the feedback we have received determines us to organize study groups an
d even more events for beginners. Summarized in a couple of words we are generally told “please don’t stop, give as many girls as possible the chance to participate in such a workshop”.
I will keep you informed on how this goes 😉 Until then, let me know your thoughts and questions about the event.