I have three weeks working out of my house, which is a luxury nowadays. So I’m going to finally do something entirely local, technical, and fun: Rails Girls LA. They’re doing a weekend workshop for beginning Ruby on Rails. While I’ll probably be way overstacked on skills for their first day, I’m doing the first day anyway. They might go over something I’m unfamiliar with, and I really have been wanting to network with other technical women in the Los Angeles area. Plus, the event is in Pasadena, which means networking with women close to home.

At DreamHost, I was usually the go-to person for reading Ruby on Rails error messages. Nobody else could read those damn things. So here’s the funny part – I knew how to debug Ruby on Rails code, but not how to actually write it. I know some Ruby basics, but not enough, really, considering Puppet is written in Ruby, and someday I’d love to teach the “Extending Puppet Using Ruby” class.

I’ve done some self-guided Ruby learning, but I’m nowhere near strong. The kicker came when I taught Advanced Puppet and a duo of our Sales Engineers knew more about how to write Ruby on the fly than I did.

I think a free workshop will knock out two goals – networking and learning Ruby. I’m rather excited about this.