I Am A Big Nerd

I had seen a banner for the Big Nerd Ranch on a site somewhere back in December as I was plowing through the skateboard book, and I thought it was pretty clever. I actually thought it looked really great. I sort of filed it away and went on my merry way.

I've recently picked up ruby and rails, and I really dig it. We do a lot of scripting and site stuff, so this would be great. I also do some work on the side, and had already started planning how to redo the insanity of my PHP and Perl sites in Rails.

I got to the point where I had sort of hit a plateau, though. This was about the same time we were planning training for the year at work. There happened to be a Big Nerd Ranch RoR Bootcamp a couple of weeks away, and I jumped on it.

The price was a bit of an issue for us. At my Large Multinational Corporation we do our budgets with separate lines for travel, food, lodging, and training. This would hit the training budget pretty hard. If you break it down, though, it's really not a bad price. I figured the actual training probably cost $2000 - $2500 when you factor in the room and board. And how do you put a price on unlimited access to the instructor and other smart people in the class?

My boss (and my boss's boss) were generous enough to make it happen. Off I go.

Sunday

I flew in Sunday afternoon and hauled myself a few miles from the far end of some distant terminal at ATL to the baggage claim area. I thought for sure I was lost a few times en route. We were supposed to meet at carousel 4, which was missing because it was under construction. There is a waiting area there, though.

There were 5 or 6 of us on that shuttle, and we headed off to the compound (Serenbe Inn). We got there a little before dinner time, so we had time to settle into our cabins and get comfortable.

The cabins were very nice. I was in the Lake House with 3 other guys. CBQ (the instructor) was in our cabin, but we never saw him there. He lived in the lab.

My cabin had a living room, TV with satellite, kitchen, sun room, and wrap-around screened-in porch. It would have been really nice if it wasn't really cold. Or if we were ever at the cabin.

At dinner CBQ offered to let us hit the lab Sunday night, or just be ready to hit the ground running with Rails 2 installed on your laptop (if you brought one). Not wanting to jump too far ahead before class even started I went back to the cabin to work on some stuff.

Class

We had breakfast in the morning at 8:30. They had a hot breakfast, cereal, breads, and a vegetarian option. They made muffins every morning that you could have as your breakfast or munch on them while you waited for the hot breakfast.

We rolled into the lab and hit the ground running. You can see the course syllabus on some of the other BNR blogs. The pace was good. There were times that I was ahead of the group, and there were times that I was totally lost. CBQ would float around the room checking on people - offering help where needed.

Most of us had our various Macs that we brought with us. There were a couple of Windows laptops, and also a couple of Linux boxes setup (Ubuntu was installed on an iMac) and waiting for their users.

We had a "ShoutBoard" running that a previous class had written. You could post comments to the board with helpful links, funny links, or just random comments. One of the guys in our class spent some time during the week refining some of it's functionality, too.

We'd take a break for lunch around 12:30, and then come back into the lab. They had cookies shortly after lunch available in the lab. We also took a walk around the grounds at 2-ish. There was one rainy day where we just worked through the walkabout time.

The Evening

Class ended around 5 or 5:30 with dinner at 6:30. You could stay in the lab if you wanted, walk around, or go back to the cabin. I would usually go back to do a video chat with my family back home.

Dinner was nice and relaxed. Towards the end of the week we started ordering wine, which you paid for when you checked out on the last day. We took a bottle back to the lab one evening. We also had some beers in the lab that Aaron brought in.

The class was really well done. Where I think the Big Nerd Ranch concept excelled, though, is that you could go back into the lab after dinner and work on whatever you wanted to. Even if it was stuff we hadn't covered or wouldn't cover. CBQ would hang out until the last person was ready to shut it down for the night.

There was one night that my whole cabin (3 students and CBQ) shut the lab down around 1:30 and all walked back to the cabin. I got back on the computer for another hour after that. I wanted to squeeze everything I could out of the experience and the opportunity. I had a hard time sleeping that week as I was so jazzed and trying to soak everything in that I possibly could.

Back To Reality

It had to come to a close, and we all climbed back in the van after lunch Friday. I will miss the group, but I've already seen some questions roll through the Big Nerd Ranch Alumni email list. Once back in the office I was tapped to use my "big nerd brain" and split a pretty big project with another guy in the office.

I've also successfully deployed 2 rails apps for my website (the site itself, and this blog). I will be working towards the migration away from PHP and Perl on my other sites.

I sincerely thank Aaron for setting up the Big Nerd Ranch, and I thank Charles (CBQ) for being so open and helpful.

I posted some pictures from the week on my .Mac gallery: http://gallery.mac.com/barrett.allison#100135&view=mosaic&sel=0