Our forth month of classes are in full swing. We’re really excited that we’ve made it this far, and the fact that we have over 70 enrolled men and ladies this month is still something we’re trying to get our heads around. HTML/CSS is being lead by Alexis Goldstein this month, and the space at New Work City holds our most popular class. Javascript/Jquery is being held in Brooklyn at the Wireless Generation space. 

Two new Girl Develop It initiatives began this month. Ruby on Rails started on Monday November 8th with its teacher Avi Flombaum co-founder of NY based Ruby Shop Designer Pages. Our largest concern heading into class was that many students wouldn’t already have their environment set up. We set aside a few hours on Sunday night where team member Vanessa Hurst and others set up shop at a local Starbucks and let students know we would be free to help should they have issues with installs. However, the evening of class everyone showed up ready to go and besides a few little hiccups we were able to start class right away. Here are some photos. 

The first lesson we learned about our RoR class is that there were two distinct sets of students. There was a group that had done development in the past and were present to learn a new language. The others were making their first venture out into the programming world. We split these groups into two separate classes for the second week as we felt they needed to be taught at very different paces. Avi Flombaum is teaching the advanced folk, and new teacher Emma Persky is teaching the beginners class. We may end up doing this with different series, we are going to watch as this progresses. 

We had our first “WTF Web Labs” in DUMBO at the Etsy offices. These Labs are designed for confused individuals swimming in acronyms to come learn about the stack, and what is actually going on inside the black box of the internet when you are surfing the web given by Vanessa Hurst. We also had experienced developers on hand available to answer questions or look over shoulders at personal projects. The Etsy offices are beyond compare and there were cool crafts everywhere. They provided us with food and drink, and were all together great hosts. We look forward to doing a repeat of this event in the future. Pictures below. 

We are taking a few week break in December to reflect over the past few months, learn, and iterate. We hope you have a great holiday season and we will see you for our next round of classes in January!