Reasons

LAMP stack was my workhorse for about 2-3 years, but I had a strong feeling that I need to move forward and switch to long-loved Ruby language (and Rails framework). But as usual I was busy with the current projects and lacked some healthy pressure, regularity and discipline.

Previously I had experience in educating others in computer science in groups, but forcing myself to switch to new technology stack was quite challenging.

Crowd learning or peer-to-peer learning idea came to my mind quickly, as it was simple, affordable (free) and fun. So I've published the post about this on one the national developers forum and got mostly positive (sic!, not skeptical) feedback and almost 40+ students got to the list easily.

Peer-to-peer learning

There are some paradigms in studying technologies/programming which can be nicely combined in our case:

• Peer-to-peer learning
• Learning by doing
• Mentorship
• Self-education, MOOCS etc.
• One-feature-micro-app methodology, nicely presented by Justin Weiss in his book.
• Pair programming

Audience

My target audience was anyone who wants study Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails from zero. Surprisingly there were some Java, PHP guys who wanted to widen their tech horizon or switch to a new stack. Also there were junior rubyists who helped others a lot.

Tools

As a communication platform we started using Google Groups first, but later switched to Slack.

For conference calls we used Google hangouts with helpful feature of recording screen sharingvsessions to YouTube.

Sometimes we used Cloud9 online IDE to code and share project online.

Obviously, Github was used for version control.

Outcomes

Well, was it worth the efforts? Yep.

I gained some soft skills of organizing everything, making curriculum, studying new tools, networking and communication skills, vision of the growing process from zero to junior developer.

Do I want to improve something? Sure thing.

I want to make it more fun and invite mentors to review the code of the students. Connect students with companies which want internship program, or contributing to beginner-friendly opensource projects.

I've found DEV community open-minded and friendly that's why I decided to share my story here.

What do you think of that? Would you like to participate?

Cheers 😜 💎

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash