Rails Girls Novi Sad

Year ago, I have participated in a Rails Girls Workshop in my hometown, Novi Sad. Rails Girls is a part of an initiative aimed at demystifying IT industry to women, by offering two-day workshops using Ruby on Rails. It was first founded in Finland in 2010, and is today a non-profitable, voluntary based community, which offers workshops all around the globe. I find this to be a very crucial movement and have to admit that even I have believed that I would never be able to code, since that is something so abstract and overly-complicated to learn for someone who has never been involved in IT before.

I have first heard about these workshops through my dear friend Milana, a RG workshop attendee. Since then she has been mentoring workshops in Novi Sad, Belgrade and Geneva. Infected by her enthusiasm, I jumped in and helped her start brand new Rails Girls chapter in her hometown, Zrenjanin.

For me, the two-day workshop was a nice taste of the web development atmosphere and the way that people with different interests and background work in a group to create something using a code, looking at the problem from different angles. This is what in my opinion ultimately makes things easier and the end result better. I especially like Ruby as a programming language as it is very simple and intuitive.

Since then, I have continued practicing myself and have found Jekyll, a simple, blog-aware, static site generator which I used to build my page, as it is in Ruby. This has opened the doors of creativity for me, as I find it fascinating that there’s so much that can be done to customize a web page. Since one of my main passions in life is design, the visual aspects of a page are especially interesting and fascinating for me. The best feeling for me is when I do a little bit of research in order to change and improve something on a page, and how I can see the results very quickly after applying my idea. GitHub is a truly amazing place and I can only imagine how many possibilities are there that I have yet to discover!

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