Ruby on Rails Meetup @ XING SE

On Wednesday 05.12 we hosted our last meetup of 2018. This time we talked about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We hosted our event on the headquarters of our partner XING SE. This event was like most of our Meetups beginner friendly. One of the goals of moinworld is to motivate women to learn new programming languages and stay curious to learn something new.

First talk by Leyla about what you need to know about Ruby on Rails

Our first talk was from Leyla Kapi, who is a Ruby on Rails developer working for Deutsches Youth For Understanding Komitee e.V. in Hamburg. She explained us the main elements that make ruby a great programming language to get started with - it is very easy to read and write and it is flexible. She then explained the public what Ruby Gems are - they are Ruby frameworks, like for example Ruby on Rails. Rails allows us to create clean and fast web applications.

There are three important principles on Ruby on Rails: the Model-View-Controller (MVC), DRY ( Don’t Repeat Yourself!) and last Conventions over Configuration. All these principles are used on Rails to make developing easier, faster and more effective. Leyla even opened a code editor in her talk and showed how easy it is to create a web application with Ruby.

Why one could prefer Ruby over other Programming Languages

We then heard a talk by Johannes von Bargen, who is a senior software engineer at XING SE. The company uses mostly Ruby for its projects and Joe explained why. Even though the “hype” around Ruby is gone and it isn’t that fashionable to declare one’s love for Ruby anymore, it is still the language he feels most comfortable with and he believes it is one of the easiest ones to write. He presented a line of code in Java and compared it to Ruby, to show how much shorter it is in Ruby.

The happy path to programming by applying your knowledge and making mistakes

Our last talk was by Dr. Tereza Iofciu, data scientist at myTaxi. Tereza studied computer science and knows a lot of programming languages, so she introduced us to the principle of the happy path. The happy path is the “perfect developing”, where a person develops a software code with no errors and without getting stuck. However, according to Tereza, this is unrealistic and can end up being demotivating. Therefore she believes that it is more important to just try a code and keep writing than to learn all there is to learn about a language before applying it.

Mingling and networking

After the talks we all got time to network and get to know each other. We from moinworld were very happy to see that many of the women who attended our coding lessons, for example python, are now continuing on their own and getting active in the comunity. That is what we do our events for! Thank you all for coming! We will see each other again in 2018, for our Kick Off on the 31.01.

See you soon! Camilla