Re-think RailsMN Curriculum

[momer]

Continuing from email, I think as we move forward with Issue https://github.com/railsmn/railsmn.github.io/issues/2, we should strongly reconsider our curriculum.

A lot of work has been put into our current curriculum (thanks Derek, Josh, et al.), but there are a few issues that have popped up over time:

• Curriculum is based on Rails 3.x, and has yet to be updated.
• The group of mentors for the specific curriculum is relatively small, which may affect the ease that learners would receive help.
• Users walk away without knowledge of how to set up their own environment outside of the Vagrant set up.

There are a number of benefits to having our own curriculum, but I think the two issues above are symptoms of

• Not having an update/review process and timeline
• Limited volunteer resources

To alleviate the above issues/symptoms, I suggest we move over to Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. Benefits:

• It's licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported which allows us the freedom to Share and Adapt it as needed.
• Many experts and beginners around the world are familiar with the material
• Michael Hartl is responsible for keeping the content up to date; and it already has support for Rails 4.x
• Rails Tutorial offers instructions and precautions for getting environments set up on different platforms
• Curriculum covers Ruby, Rails, Git, Rspec, TDD

[derekrockwell]

Agreed. That being said, how can we best structure the events going forward? I've generally liked how we open or close with lightning talks and then leave the rest of the time to hack-time, I think that's been working, but do we need to structure the hack-time more or continue leaving it freeform?

Are there logical breakpoints within Hartl that we could say 'for your first session your goal is to reach X'? Or do we just let them wing it using us (and other participants) as mentors?

I'm also curious on your opinions regarding Windows machines. Last time I tried Ruby development I was left horrendously miffed until I booted up a Linux VM and went that route until I got a Mac. How do we feel about something like nitrous.io?