Almost 4 years since I attended my last (and first) SkillSwap I had the good fortune to grab a space at last night's Introduction to Rails presented by Dominic Mitchell. This was held at Lighthouse in one of the studios and was a really great venue - although we did have to fight our way through the Day of the Figurines launch party to get downstairs.

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The evening started off with a 30 to 40 minute talk on Rails and Ruby, what is good, what is less good, what it does best and of course the history. We then had some hands-on practical tasks, and so we split into groups and worked in groups of 2 or 3 to follow Dom's easy-to-follow instruction sheets.

Stage One: Creation of a model
Stage Two: Creation of a database table
Stage Three: Get rails to create the database
Stage Four: Create the scaffold to get the "quick and dirty" interface working

This followed on really well for me from the excellent Ruby on Rails for .Net developers I attended at WebDD as it covered a similar introduction, but with play time too.

All in all an excellent evening, and again leaving me with the intention to devote some playtime to Ruby and Rails. It would be great to be able to have a follow up event to this one (or I guess I could keep an eye out for Brighton Ruby meetings), as I know that Dom didn't get through all of his slides and examples - I'd love to know what else he had in store for us...