It's challenging enough to lead just a handful of people through hands-on training. To get a whole Harvard room full of people to stay on track learning a new language/editor/software repository--that's ambitious! But you guys pulled it off. The round-the-room facilitators were very helpful too; I was able to keep up. You provided a great jump-start for Ruby and Rails. Thanks.

Having given hands-on dev training before (long time ago), I know how hard it is to get things to go smoothly. It was good you made the required edits simple, though for newbies even that was a little tricky until y'all posted the slides online (thanks for getting that done).

Unfortunately, I think many folks lost the forest for the trees. Rails has a lot of moving parts and it wasn't always clear how the various files we looked at and edited fit together, or what was generated by rails vs. what you guys had done that we pulled via git. More upfront explanation, along with some diagrams mixed into the slides might help.

Of course the technical issues made things rouger, esp. on windows (which most of us still have :) Stumbling through those made it more likely we'd get bogged down in the details and miss the power of what we were doing. Using git seemed to add an extra layer of complication that presumably isn't necessary (and caused most of my issues early on).

While testing is great, maybe a little more focus on the resulting web page (esp. during the early parts) would help folks focus on what's happening. Note that with windows laptops with only 2G RAM, running the tests took a very long time for some, which made them get behind and not run them much.

Overall my friends and I enjoyed it, though I think some went away not overly impressed with rails. The guys providing assistance were great, and I'm grateful for all of you volunteering your time to make this happen. I look forward to any such future sessions you guys do!