Scrappy Academy*

** Disclaimer: All subject to review, change, and overall better scrappiness **

Goals

Self study group that follows hungry academy course
Pick one open source project to contribute to
Invite Ruby community members to weekly meetings as mentors

Values

Prone to action

Write code, we don't care if it sucks, we'll get better
Building over talking
Disagreements are settled with code

Have fun along the way!
Collaborative

Time

3 months
Start in the first two weeks of March

Collaboration Types

Meet at least once a week
Remote pair sessions
Complete 2-4 full day hackathons in 3 months
- Something specific i.e. Open source, Focused learning, etc.
- Collaborative
Tools
- Chatroom (Campfire/Hipchat)
- Forum
- Github

Unbaked Ideas:

Integrate into local meetups with evening learn/hacks
Sponsorships to cover space and/or offer stuff (dinner, beer, etc) as a thanks to mentors

Materials

http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/

My current strategy is to use this material heavily. I have worked through some of the material and it was helpful.

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

This is a heavy rails course that would overlap with the jumpstartlab materials.

http://www.learntocodethehardway.org

For pure Ruby tutorials, I have used it and found it to be enjoyable. +1 for making it easy for folks picking of their first programming language.

http://teamtreehouse.com/

For learning front end dev (CSS, Sass, js, etc.)

http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011
- 8 one hour classes followed by assigned course work from Agile Web Development with Rails version 4
http://gitimmersion.com/
- Learning git

Spaces

Living Social / Hungry Academy

Syllabus

Week One:

Opensource projects

http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/projects/jsmerchant.html
- Provide notes on difference in Rails 2.3 to 3.0 way, help fill in gaps, and note bugs/errors
What else?

Footnotes

Scrappy Acadamy naming credit goes to @tourdedave

The experience level varies. We have people moving past intermediate and others that are completely new to Ruby/Rails. I was looking through Agile Web Development, my suggestion is to have folks new to Ruby/Rails start working with the book. Some Ruby fundamentals are going to needed along the way. Any thoughts to those who have worked through the examples? I have only read the first chapter myself.

Given the different skill levels present, I see two issues we will want to address:

Objectives, what are the specifics we are going to do?
Time, what are we going to do with the time we meet up?

Here are some questions to get things going:

Are we going to have a weekly 'lesson' that we task ourselves with?
Should we focus on code review/pair programming?
Would we like to invite a Rubyist to come share share a design/practice?
Would we like to task someone with a small presentation (10-15mins) each week?

I'd like to have a minimal structure for us to give us a 'We did this' each week. What about an un-conferance style for objectives? Everyone shows up and write down what they would like to accomplish. We then organize study groups around these objectives and plan ways for us to mix the groups up a bit to get some cross collaboration going? We can review the next meeting to see how it went.

And yes, there are more questions than answers right now, but that is cool. Everyone is really motivated, let's keep the goals in mind and see where we end up.

jwieringa/scrappyAcadamy.markdown