Excitement! I'm Teaching Rails at the Iron Yard Houston
Teaching Ruby has been awesome. It’s been so awesome that I want more. I want to meet the students face to face, and help change their lives for the better. To make that happen, I’m going to teach Rails at Houston’s first open-source stack code school. The Iron Yard Houston. Classes start June 2nd.
In March, I flew to Greenville, South Carolina, to experience a course first hand. The cohorts were 8 weeks into their JavaScript course, and amazed me with their abilities. This was the real deal (discussing how to make Backbone models more maintainable). The Iron Yard came to Houston, and asked me to teach the Rails Engineering course. I kept looking for a reason to say no …
The Iron Yard’s is student focused to its core. Their formula is not only badass but is also designed for optimal awesome for the students. Reasonable rates, fostering community involvement, mock interviews, and a 100% guarantee. I had no more “no’s” to give.
I’m teaching a Ruby heavy Rails Engineering course. Matt Keas is leading the front end course (JavaScripts).
My goal? Give people the opportunity to learn how to have a much happier career. All while using he happiest stack I’ve encountered yet: Rails+. Rails+: Rails as the API backend or Rails as the prototype. We’ll focus heavily on Ruby, only getting into Rails after we’ve created console and sinatra apps. Stretch goal: EmberJS.
And the coolest thing? Instructors send a weekly recap of what their cohorts are doing. Awesomely, the other instructors believe as I do students should learn Ruby. After all, Rails isn’t magic, it’s Ruby.
TechSas: Free Coding Event (Houston, May 10th, 2014)
Since everything is bigger in Texas, we’re hosting a free coding event, Tech-sas. We’ve sold out our venue, which is pretty freaking awesome. Over 200 people, both with some coding experience and total beginners, will learn how to build awesome things. (Free). (Soldout). ( :O )
Final Slug of Awesomeness? Free Coding for Kids (Scratch)
Volunteering at the Austin KidsCodeCamp at RailsConf (Austin) was a changing experience. From 8-15 years old, kids were learning to program using Scratch, blew their minds wide open. Especially Robots – So much excitement, very potential.
The Iron Yard has (free) code schools for kids all over the south and southeast.