#PLEASE NOTE, SESSION DOCUMENTATION HAS MOVED TO THE OPEN CAMP REPOSITORY HERE

Before Each Session

• IMPORTANT: Make sure you have followed the directions to install our Ruby on Rails virtual machine
• Catch up on the content from any previous sessions you may have missed from the links below.
• Join the RailsMN Google Group!
• Follow @RailsMN on Twitter!
• Spend some time gaining a basic understanding of the basic languages of the web: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Codecademy is a great place to start learning the basics that can be built on.

Resources

• Here is a link to some handy commands for the console, Ruby and Rails
• Code School has great introduction tutorials to Rails and many of the other technologies associated with Rails. Work through this once you've attended a session or two and have a firm grasp on HTML/CSS/JavaScript
• RailsCasts has awesome webcasts for beginner, intermediate and advanced Ruby on Rails concepts
• Ruby on Rails by Michael Hartl is an awesome walkthrough of a simple Rails application. The documentation can be hard to follow at points, but the content is fantastic.
• Ruby on Rails Guides is the go-to place to get deeper understanding for the tools available within Rails with lots of practical examples

Goal

Learning Ruby on Rails is hard. Learning Rails doesn't just mean you're learning one thing, but the entire web development ecosystem as well. Check out this visual representation of what you learn with Rails.

With that, the objective of the 'Building OpenCamp' series is to provide a practical, hands-on, community based approach to teaching Ruby on Rails. Our theory is that these events in combination with some of the online resources available, we'll be able to help people 'jump the chasm' of learning Rails.

Each month we will have a new session that will build on the previous sessions to ultimately build what could be considered a minimal, open source implementation of Basecamp. Basecamp is a project management web application that Ruby on Rails was born out of.

We hope this combination of mentorship, web development topic presentations and coding sessions will give you the motivation and push needed to teach you how to become a Ruby on Rails developer. As a caveat, learning is a give-and-take endeavour, so please provide us with feedback to help us make RailsMN better.

Session agenda overview

Introduction (30 minutes)

• Logistics, pizza and drinks
• Review of what we did last time
• Overview of the agenda for the nights session

Hack time (90 minutes)

• Walk through implementing OpenCamp features as documented by the session writeups below
• Will bring the group back together periodically to discuss what we've done
• Mentors will roam and help you follow along with the directions

Lightning talks and presentations (30 minutes)

• Organizers or mentors will present on topics relevant to Rails or web development
• Topics will be 10 minutes each

OpenCamp series

Session 4 (July 8)

• Add custom e-mail confirmations for task creation
• Deploy Open Camp to Heroku
• Talk about some development tools to aide debugging

Session 3 (June 10)

• Added Bootstrap for UI, headers, footers
• Added simple validations for tasks
• Added due dates for tasks
• Set up transactional e-mail for our development machines

Session 2 (May 13)

• Update VM settings
• Add user authentication
• Create user tests
• Lightning talks
  • Test Driven Development
  • Capybara
  • Git

Session 1 (April 8)

• Introduction to the event series
• Getting set up with the virtual machine
• Creating the first lines of OpenCamp
• Presentation on MVC, REST, databases and ActiveRecord

Possible Future Topics:

• CoffeeScript
• SASS/SCSS
• Continuous Integration
• Deployment
• Etc