A few weeks ago, the seventh edition of Rails Girls took place in Warsaw, and for the second year in a row Fieldly sponsored the event. Tomasz Warkocki, CTO at Fieldly, participated as a mentor, and Magdalena Malinowska, developer from Fieldly, was involved in organizing the event.
Founded by Linda Liukas and Karri Saarinen, Rails Girls is an international non-profit initiative, that aims to give tools for women to build their ideas, by opening up technology and making it more approachable for girls. The main goal is to open IT to women and women to IT, by empowering girls all over the world to build the capacity and acquire the tools to conquer the online frontier. The first event Rails Girls organized took place in Helsinki in November 2010, where over 100 women signed up to participate. Since then, Rails Girls has been organizing free events all over the world, attracting thousands of women to the world of web development.
During the events the participants are provided with basic tools which help them understand technology and the process of building web applications. The idea is to create a space where women who want to learn to code can meet and study under the wings of experienced programmers.
Magdalena Malinowska looks back at a very successful event that got loads of positive feedback from the attendees. Especially appreciated was the fact that the organizers involved more coaches than they normally do. This made it possible to create smaller groups of attendees, and the coaches could therefore easily focus on each participant.
In addition to coding, the participants of the event also got to listen to inspiring presentations on themes such as remote work, different roles in IT projects and career stories within programming. Another much appreciated feature during the event was a brand-new element – a Q&A panel debate consisting of one recruiter and three programmers, one of whom a Rails Girls alumni.
Magdalena is proud to work at a company that support initiatives such as Rails Girls:
I'm very proud that Fieldly is supporting initiatives such as Rails Girls. It's so important to break the old idea that programming is associated with men. I think these workshops are doing exactly that - showing that programming is not gender related. Both by giving women the possibility to try coding, and also by inviting women who are successful in coding that can act as role models. I’m also glad that Fieldly works with these types of questions in practice and not just in theory. 36% of the Fieldly engineering team are women!
In summary, Rails Girls Warsawa was a very successful event, and Fieldly is happy to be a part of this important initiative!
Want to learn more about Rails Girls? Visit www.railsgirls.com
