We’ve trained 78 developers in Ruby on Rails in the past five months. The design of the classes have evolved such that Rails & agile are now highly coupled.
During last week’s two-day class, we ran 25 short workshops during which students wrote a blog, the web app developer’s rite of passage.
Each workshop was completed by pair programming. It was amazing to witness the buzz that filled our office as students talked through solutions with each together.
We also organized our office so the lectures were delivered to the group, seated in a circle, facing away from the pairing stations.
No checking email or other distractions. Lots of questions & discussions as we progressed.
In Beginning Rails, we teach Ruby and Rails through Test-Driven Development. When students write their blog, every line of code is written test-first.
In Advanced Rails, we teach refactoring to Rails best practices patterns. We pick up where we left off in the Beginning Rails class. We test-drive new features to the blog, integrating version control with git and continuous integration into the development cycle.
For both classes, we send students on their way with the full source code to Umbrella Today? for reference.
We have arrived at the logical conclusion that we teach best at our office. Therefore, we’re pleased to announce classes once at month at our Boston office:

If you can’t make it to our Boston office, we’ll go to your office. We just ask that you set up a similar pair programming environment.