Dunja Radulov wrote this on July 1, 2016

Rails Girls Novi Sad #4: Empowering Women Through Code

Last weekend, we co-hosted the fourth Rails Girls workshop, welcoming 20 women to our office to learn how to develop web applications.

Rails Girls is a global initiative with the aim of empowering women through teaching them how to code in Ruby on Rails.

The two-day workshop is quite challenging, but all the participants did a great job and successfully learned how to design, prototype and code their first web applications.

Our friends from the organizing team — Milana Ljubisavljević, Aleksandra Vukošić and Kristina Stojaković have been joined by Smiljana Mihajlović, who is now working on promoting the initiative. As always, they all did a great job organizing the workshop.

Rendered Text had two first-time volunteer mentors in this workshop - Ervin Barta and Jovan Ivanović. We’re proud that the majority of our developers have now participated as mentors in the workshops :)

To make this blog post a more interesting read, this time around we decided to chase our beloved mentors around the office and ask them to write a few words about the workshop. Ervin enjoyed participating in the workshop:

Since the best way to learn is to teach, I decided to take part in the workshop as a mentor for the first time. I think it’s important to bring programming closer to people, because the majority is afraid of its complexity. However, with modern tools at hand, and after spending a little time behind the keyboard, they get amazed at how much they’ve accomplished in such a short amount of time. This Rails Girls event was a great opportunity to put this into practice, and I’m happy that I got the chance to take part in it. We had lots of fun, made new friends and learned something new along the way.

Here are Jovan’s impressions about the workshop:

Rails Girls is an excellent opportunity to help reduce the underrepresentation of women in programming by showing the attendees how to take their first steps the Ruby world. This will hopefully serve as a starting point from which they will expand their knowledge, and continue creating their own applications. The importance of workshops like this one is in changing the way we see programming from an esoteric activity for the select few to an activity that is transparent and open to all.

We’re happy to support a great initiative like this one, and we’re looking forward to meeting more future girl programmers in the workshops to follow.

Take a look at our Rails Girls Facebook album to see more photos from the workshop.

If you’d like to participate in the next workshop, you can follow @RailsGirlsNS and @RenderedText on Twitter, or subscribe to our events RSS feed.