Last night I stopped by the NYC Rails meetup group, which is now hosted at the Flatiron School, where students with no previous programming background learn the fundamentals of web development during the intense 3-month program. One of my friends is in the program right now, so it was great to chat with her and learn about it from someone who’s there almost 24/7 :)

Every week, a group of students present a project that they created to the fellow students and anyone attending the meetup. Yesterday 3 students demoed the app they called Octomaps, that shows locations of collaborators for a given Github repo on a map view. It was a pretty cool demo, especially given the fact that the students were just a few weeks into the program.

The app required using Github and maps API, database integration, some front-end presentation code, then deployment to Heroku. But above all just coming up a cool idea and not being afraid to dive in and implement in only a few days was very admirable.

Aside from great effort from students, major props go to Avi Flombaum, who runs the school and teaches most of the classes. I only was there for an hour, but it was obvious that he instills lots of enthusiasm and fosters curiosity (both essential for a web developer, I think), in addition to sharing the knowledge. Very impressive!

If you’re into web development, Ruby or just want to find out what you could learn in just 3 months, you should definitely stop by one of the meetups. They run through end of April, and next week is supposed to be an interesting group lunch ordering app. Seamless, watch out!