In October 2018 we launched the first edition of Spark Academy – a learning and skill sharing program for Ruby on Rails developers. Each workshop consisted of a theoretical introduction to the topic followed by a live coding session. Most of the times participants also got an optional home assignment to be submitted for review and feedback. All meetings were free of charge and open not only to the employees of Spark Solutions but also any other devs willing to take part. The only thing they had to do was complete a short evaluation task to make sure that they possessed the minimum level of knowledge essential to understand and fully benefit from the class.
The workshops began on 25th October 2018 and followed through 7th February 2019.
Spark Academy’s first edition in numbers:
- 7 workshops
- 7 mentors
- 30+ participants
- countless beers & pizzas 😀
“Mentors shared their expertise with passion. Every workshop taught skills which can be used to solve real-world problems. Newest Rails features, payment provider integration, and serverless solutions are trending topic these days. Students armed with this knowledge are ready to face new challenges.” – Piotr Leniec, Senior Fullstack Developer, Spark Solutions
Topics:
The workshops were designed primarily for Junior and Mid RoR developers. However, some Senior devs, PMs and QA also attended and found the subjects interesting and useful for their work.
25th October 2018: PORO objects & their usage
8th November 2018 AWS/Heroku/DevOps
22nd November 2018 Railway Oriented Programming
6th December 2018 Newest Rails Features: Action Cable (+ a special Santa’s coming to town surprise)
10th January 2019 Rails Performance Optimization
24th January /2019 Payment Provider Integration
7th February /2019 Microservices in Ruby and Amazon Lambda
Mentors:
Experienced Fullstack and RoR developers form Spark Solutions volunteered to run the workshops and share their knowledge with colleagues. This proved to be beneficial for both parties, as mentors had an opportunity to polish their public speaking and presentation skills. Participants, on the other hand, could live code together with their peers and ask as many questions as they wanted.
Piotr Leniec – Senior Fullstack Dev at Spark Solutions
Yuriy Kushnir – Senior RoR Dev at Spark Solutions
BogusÅ‚aw Tolarz – Senior RoR Dev at Spark Solutions
Nathaniel Nande – Senior RoR Dev at Spark Solutions
Alexey Suslyakov – Senior RoR Dev at Spark Solutions
PrzemysÅ‚aw Kosakowski – Ruby on Rails Developer at Spark Solutions
Sergey Vygovsky – Ruby on Rails Developer at Spark Solutions
Networking (beers & pizza time)
Apart from insightful and packed with knowledge Ruby classes, the opportunity to meet and socialize with other devs was also of great value. Spark Solutions provided the space + beers & snacks. Participants and mentors could talk in more private attire and have some fun on a Thursday night.
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