SF Jan 24 & 25 Rails Workshop at Pivotal Labs (@lilliealbert)

[lilliealbert]

Organizer: @lilliealbert
Venue: Pivotal Labs
Date: Jan 24/25
Curriculum: Rails

TODOS

• Set Venue
• Create Event on Bridge Troll
• Order Installfest Pizza
• Order Saturday breakfast
• Order Lunch Catering
• Find place for afterparty

[lilliealbert]

Emailed students to see if any repeat attendees wanted to help with check-ins.

Friday: Stella C & Meredith T (Katherine M as relief help)
Saturday: Grace & Megan

And for posterity, here's what I wrote:

Hello RailsBridge attendees!

My name is Lillie, and I'm organizing the Rails workshop that you're attending next weekend. Since I'm only one person, I need some help with getting students and volunteers checked in on Friday night and Saturday morning. Pivotal Labs' building security requires us to ferry people through the lobby, so: need moar people than just me :D

Who among you has been to a workshop before and can do the "Get a Sticker" step with me remotely this week, and help check people in on Friday night instead? The installfest runs from 6:30-9pm on Friday, but people usually show up early, so someone should be ready starting at 6pm (people really tend to just come straight from work).

I also need help on Saturday morning before the workshops get started! This would entail getting to the building ~8:30am to let the early birds in.

If this is your first workshop, don't volunteer — you should be installing and/or mingling :D If this isn't your first workshop, can you help?

Thanks,
Lillie

[lilliealbert]

Emailed students to see if anyone beginners wanted to focus on Ruby instead of Rails on Saturday, with the plan to use Alex's Ruby curriculum .

Students interested a Ruby section:

• Megan K
• Wilda T
• Rebecca T
• Leslie C, maybe?
• Shannon F
• Elizabeth H
• Laura K

[lilliealbert]

Friday schedule:

• During the day — Joe drops off extension cords at Pivotal front desk
• 5:50pm — Lillie arrives at Pivotal, sets up tables / extension cords / projectors with instructions for the evening
• 6pm — Travis meets Stella & Meredith in the lobby with chairs / table for checkins
  • If they have smartphones w/service, they can do Bridge Troll checkin from there, otherwise we'll have a second table upstairs
• 6:30pm — Pizza arrives
• 6:30pm — Things officially start happening
• 7pm — We start being sad about the speed of the wifi
• 8:30pm —Start wrapping up

Saturday schedule:

• 8:25am — Lillie and Travis arrive
• 8:30am — Bagels arrive
• 8:40am — Travis meets Grace & Megan in the lobby to set up checkins
  • If they have smartphones w/service, they can do Bridge Troll checkin from there, otherwise we'll have a second table upstairs
• 9am — People start arriving
• 9:25am — 2 volunteers (TBD) take over checkins so Grace & Megan can attend the opening presentation
• 9:30am — Lillie gives opening presentation
• 9:50am — Break into small groups, find conference rooms, get settled in
• 10:15am — Learning begins
• 12pm — Lunch arrives
• 12:15pm-1pm — Lunch
• 1pm-4pm — Learning
• 2:30/3pm — Afternoon Coffee/Tea Breaks
• 4:15pm — Final presentation
• 4:30pm — Student & Volunteer retros
• 5pm — Head to either Thirsty Bear or The Cheiftan

[lilliealbert]

Overall, this workshop went really smoothly. Pivotal Labs has pretty much the ideal space for a workshop. I forgot to initially confirm that they'd be paying for the food, so for future me: make sure to double check with hosts what they're going to pay for food so you don't have a few days of fear of fundraising :D

I kept the student limit to 60 people until a few days prior to the workshop, then bumped it up to 72 to let in everyone from the waitlist. I never posted it to Meetup, but instead did outreach to some of the other communities I'm involved with (Dev Bootcamp women mailing list, Double Union). Plus lots of tweets on Twitter.

I did email all the students who identified as male to ask who they were coming as the +1 of — most of the them wrote back immediately with the name of the person; I did get push back from one person and a non-response that turned into a no-show. (The person who pushed back on needing to be the guest of a woman immediately apologized, which was nice, but makes me think that we need to be enforcing that rule consistently.)

Using Bridge Troll to do the class sorting was great; in the morning I ran around Pivotal and got the names of the conference rooms, then draw a rough map on the white board behind where I was giving the morning presentation. Having the names of the conference rooms + a map was invaluable in getting people into rooms.

Since we were using Chaffee's Ruby curriculum, I emailed with students about a week ahead of time to see if anyone wanted to focus on Ruby instead of Rails. That worked out nicely.

On Thursday evening, I sent all the students an email reiterating that they needed to download things BEFORE the Installfest on Friday. I don't remember hearing that the wifi really sucked at any point, so I'm gonna call that one a major success.

I told Pivotal that we'd be having ~70 people, since I had about 90 people RSVP'd and figured there'd be some no shows. We definitely didn't have enough food for the 83 people that were actually there on Saturday, so I ordered some pizza at 12:15pm, as soon as I looked at the food we had. I think next time I'll just ask for as much food as we have people RSVPd, and not gamble with no-show rates. The pizza go there ~12:45pm, so it was pretty much fine, and nowhere near as bad as that time we got cold lasagna for 80 O_O.

We're close to having a basic version of post-workshop surveys in Bridge Troll, but I think this time around I'm just going to send the Google form survey. I did have about 10 different people how they can find out about upcoming workshops, and since Bridge Troll doesn't have announcement capabilities yet, I told them to watch Bridge Troll :(

Here are the notes from the student retro; they had great feedback & ideas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nAjYuuztC4FPInSStT6UGXZNL8K5NNzdAbZiq6Kc9s0/edit?usp=sharing

[lilliealbert]

Also for posterity, my email to students imploring them to download RailsInstaller or XCode prior to the Installfest:

Hey all!

I'm super psyched to see you tomorrow night at Pivotal Labs for the workshop. Either tonight or tomorrow (perhaps at work or school?), you should download either RailsInstaller (PC + many Mac operating systems) or XCode (Macs on Mavericks) ahead of time.

It's worth repeating: download either RailsInstaller or XCode ahead of time! The wifi at Pivotal will be terrrrrrrrrribly slow with all the people trying to download things, and we need to save the bandwidth for the other, smaller downloads during the Installfest.

So go to http://docs.railsbridge.org/installfest/choose_your_operating_system, choose your OS, and then keep going until you either have RailsInstaller or XCode downloaded. Feel free to keep going with the instructions or stop, but having those things downloaded is necessary!!!

See you tomorrow!

Best,
Lillie