Join us for a Pre-Startup Weekend Rails Bootcamp. This is not only FREE for Startup Weekend Attendees, but for EVERYONE!  We want you to come, learn about Rails, and see some of the energy that is Startup Weekend.

Today, more startups than ever are choosing hyper productive language / frameworks like Ruby w/ Rails or Python w/ Django and cloud deployments.  If you'd like to use Startup Weekend as a place to get your Rails on (and on the cloud), then this class is for you.

We want you to join us for a day of intense project based learning.  We'll build and deploy to the cloud :

• a quote of the day app
• a blog
• a task list app
• a music database

Along the way, you'll have a chance to learn how to :

• deploy a rails app to the cloud in 5 minutes
• create a database schema & migrate it over time
• write models, views, and controllers in rails
• use plugins for
  • logging in
  • picture resizing

If you're new to Ruby or Rails, we'll have a lot of training wheels for you to hold on to as we pull you through these projects.  

If you've played with Rails a bit, but want some more practice before living and breathing it for 54 hours at Startup Weekend, then we'll give you a chance to dig deeper into the functionality of each of these apps.

This class will go fast, and skim over some of the material.  There's a lot to Rails!  But we'll make sure the basic stuff sticks, and you'll get to see and do a whole lot of the other stuff.  To give you an idea of the value that we're offering you, Jeremy is offering a 4-day unabridged version of this class at SolutionsIQ coming up for $1295 (early bird pricing).

What to bring:

1. Laptop (Windows or Mac)
2. If you are new to Ruby, we ask you to spend 20 minutes going through this tutorial beforehand
3. We'll send you a list of installation links before the session to save some time in configuring your machine.
4. We'll be ordering pizza, feel free to bring money to pitch in, or a sack lunch.

About Your Instructors

Jeremy Lightsmith and Wes Maldonado have been writing Rails code for startups for over 5 years, and have been developing for a lot longer than that.  They worked together at Pivotal Labs, a startup dev shop in San Francisco.

Today, Jeremy helps software teams get more productive with tools like Agile & Lean & Rails.  

And today, after an extremely brief stint as an independent, Wes has been snatched up by Whitepages.com who are very happy to have him helping them with Rails and with Scrum.

Startup Weekend

This will be one of two events taking place the weekend before Startup Weekend in an effort to help expand the educational opportunities that Startup Weekend can provide. Be sure to thank Mike Koss with StartPad for giving us the space!

Also, be sure to check out the Google AppEngine bootcamp at the same place on Saturday, the day before this event. 

Of course, make sure to buy your tickets for the main event on March 19th - 21st.