Learn Ruby, Rails, and more in Boston through Skillshare

Skillshare, a community marketplace for classes, has announced a series of tech classes in Boston from October 10th to the beginning of November.

thoughtbot is participating with three new low-cost, introductory evening classes, in contrast to our full-day, intensive workshops that we’ve been giving for more than four years.

Greenhorn Connect is participating with $500 worth of scholarships for high school and college students. To qualify, students must live in the Boston area and forward their Skillshare confirmation emails to Akaash Achreja. You will receive $10 sponsorship back via Paypal.

thoughtbot evening Skillshare classes

Designing, Developing, and Launching a Successful Web Application | Wednesday, October 10th | 7-8:30 p.m. | thoughtbot office | Chad Pytel | Non-technical students will learn the process of building a working web application.

Introduction to Ruby | Monday, October 15th | 7-9 p.m. | thoughtbot office | Matt Mongeau | Students will learn Ruby language syntax, how to write Ruby objects, and how objects interact with one another.

Introduction to Ruby on Rails | Wednesday, November 7th | 7-9 p.m. | thoughtbot office | Chad Pytel | Students will learn the basics of the Ruby on Rails web application framework.

Other evening Skillshare classes in the curated list

Photoshop Quickstart for Beginners | Monday, October 15th | 7-9 p.m. | Workbar Boston | Gayle Rosen | Students will get a hands-on introduction to the photo editing software.

Technical Decision-Making for Non-Technical Founders | Monday, October 15th | 5-6:30 p.m. | Harvard Innovation Lab | Brandon Liu | Non-technical students will learn the most important web technologies.

Illustrator Quickstart for Beginners | Monday, November 5th | 7-9 p.m. | Workbar Boston | Gayle Rosen | Students will be learn the basics of Adobe Illustrator.

UX Research for the Web and Applications | Thursday, November 8th | 6-8 p.m. | Workbar Boston | Danielle Nordin | Students will learn to connect with users when building web or mobile applications.

Workshops and Apprentice.io in SF

We’re opening an office in San Francisco and bringing our full suite of services with us, including workshops and apprentice.io.

Workshops

Our first two workshops are Design for Developers (July 16 & 17) and Intro to Ruby on Rails (August 20 & 21).

We’ve been operating our workshops regularly in Boston and sporadically around the country for about four years now, and we’re excited to now begin offering them all regularly on the West Coast.

If the dates above don’t work for you, you can register to be notified when we schedule the next course at the links above.

apprentice.io

We’re also excited to add another location for our mentorship program.

If location was an issue before, I’d encourage you to apply to the program.

Movin’ on up!

By the end of 2010, thoughtbot’s growth led to a seriously crowded office. In January 2011, we took over the 30-year headquarters of Hair Club for Men and began to envision what thoughtbot’s new headquarters would become! We started tearing down walls, picking up leftover toupées and planning for a cutting-edge expansion on the top two floors of 41 Winter Street, in Downtown Crossing. This past July, we said goodbye to our first downtown Boston location and moved on up to our brand new office.

Not only were we able to expand the number of desks and conferences rooms from what we had previously, we also were able to build a training room that can hold over 30 people for trainings, hackfests, and events. 

Heres are some photos of the remodeling process.

We built walls!

We cut through floors!

Coolest construction job - being able to use stilts! 

Over the next five months, our new space transformed: from a 1970’s hair salon to a demolition site; from a demolition site to two gutted floors that were quickly filled with steel beams, new pipes, paint, and sheetrock. As winter turned to spring, our new office was pristine - a team effort on every level. 

With all our new space, why wouldn’t we brand it with a 15 foot logo of our chief evangelist, Ralph!

Hi Ralph! 

Clearly, we’ve been productive and busier than ever as we’ve settled into our new home.

We hope you’ll stop by for one of our meet-ups, hackfests, attend a workshop, or even become an apprentice.  

Last four photographs, Conor Macdonald. 

Design by Leonardi Aray Architects.

Design for Developers

I’ll be teaching the next session of our Design for Developers workshop on December 7th & 8th at our Boston offices.

The workshop is aimed at developers (as well as non-developers) who know HTML and CSS, but feel like they don’t have the graphic design skills to make something that looks good enough to show customers and clients. I want to ease the pain of developers who feel like this:

I’m a developer who is a HORRIBLE at design so I don’t even know where to start.

I have the technical skills but my designed sites and interfaces are always awful, I know how to build a site technically and I know when a site  looks bad, but I’m rarely able to do anything about it.

The workshop is heavily focused on hands-on instruction, so that you can start to see immediate improvements in your ability to layout pages, pick and use typefaces, and work with color.

Visit the workshops site to learn more and register.

On the Monday and Tuesday before this workshop, we’ll also be running our Advanced HTML & CSS workshop. This workshop provides a solid foundation in HTML and CSS fundamentals. We’re running these workshops back to back to give folks the opportunity to get a crash course in the full stack of skills you’ll need to design and build great pages.

If you’d like to find out more about either workshop and figure out which one might be right for you, drop us a line.

Backbone.js on Rails live audio Q&A chat

Last Friday, October 14th, we hosted a two hour live Q&A chat for purchasers of our Backbone.js on Rails eBook with co-author Jason Morrison. We invited people who have downloaded the book to submit questions ahead of time, and then join us in chat for a discussion.

We’re pleased to offer the recording and notes as a free resources. You can download the Backbone.js on Rails live Q&A chat audio and notes over on our Workshops site.