Peter Marklund's Home

This weekend I taught a three day Ruby on Rails course here in Rome in Italy. It was a great experience and the people down here have shown the greatest hospitality and have taken very well care of me.

The format of the course was like a workshop with a small group of participants in a private and relaxed setting. I used my course material as a starting point and a road map but then improvised a lot and ended up doing a lot of hands on programming. Basically the course was divided into three parts:

1. Ruby and Rails fundamentals. A lot of time was spent on the programming language itself and we toured the features of Ruby by live coding in TextMate.
2. Writing a demo application. Similar to the AWR book, I built the basics for a store application, including file upload, advanced ActiveRecord associations, and deployment to a VPS with Capistrano.
3. The participants got to work on different features in the application. Time was also spent code reviewing the participants own Rails applications.

Overall I must say the course was quite a success. Every time I teach a course I look for ways to make my courses more interactive, more hands on, and more tailored to the needs of the participants.

I also had a great time outside the course in Rome - a city that I fell in love with immediately.