My Ruby on Rails Talk at Chennai Geeks Meetup (2012)

I’ve always been a part of the Chennai geeks community, used to attend most of the monthly meetup and I also follow the Facebook group activities.

We meet on the 3rd saturday of every month to discuss about the trends in technology followed by an informal discussion where people share their experience about the technology they work with and the problems that they solved recently. It usually goes on for 2 hours (not more than that) but it’s so absorbing and inspiring to see the geeks in action with some code and stuffs. Everytime when I get back home after the Chennai geeks meetup I used to feel so motivated and want to try something that they demonstrated during the meetup.

After attending most of these meetups for the past 2 years, this month i got a chance to give a talk here. Every month we used to have some kind of voting on different topics to see which one should be discussed during the next meetup, and someone has to volunteer to give a talk. So this month (September 2012) we had a voting in the facebook group and people wanted Ruby on Rails session. So I volunteered to do a hands-on session to get people started with RoR.

Last saturday the meetup happened, I was there at the railsfactory mount road office along with the other chennai geeks. Started the talk at around 11:30 and it went on till 1:30pm, that’s like 2 hours Man! I never thought i could do such long tech talks. This is actually my second tech/public speech, the first one that i did was during Mobile Camp Chennai which happened at IIT a year ago.

Madhu has a nice write-up, a summary of my chennai-geeks talk in her blogpost. People were so active, they asked a lot of questions and made the session more interactive. Soon after the talk was over i got some good feedbacks from the people which made me feel so great, that’s a good feeling. Maybe I should do this again and again (i mean the public talks/presentations).

But it was kind of hard to teach Rails in 2hrs because there are so many things that you have to talk about in order to make the audience feel easy and comfortable with this new framework. Otherwise, you might end up confusing them. So I’m happy that the people understood and found my talk really interesting. Actually i was waiting for a chance to contribute back to this amazing community that taught me so much and I’m glad that happened :)