thoughtbot, the HBS Rock Center, and the TechMedia Club invite you to 3 free afternoon workshops the first week of May. Harvard Business School students will learn how to run web applications on their laptops, make code changes, and deploy the app to production.

Why should I learn how to code?

According to startup lore[1], Ev, Biz, Goldman, and others at Odeo all had a running version of Twitter on their laptops while it was initially being created. They were not “developers per se” but could and did make code changes, pushing the code into version control and deploying it to production.

Sometimes by necessity and other times by personality, many great startups have a culture of “I can help with that.” Designers learn server-side code. MBAs learn design. Developers learn operations. The goal is minimize the time between coming up with an idea and having users try it.

What’s the schedule?

Tuesday, May 3, 3pm-5pm – configure laptops to run Rails app in development, get code

Wednesday, May 4, 3pm-5pm – apply universal design principles in HTML, change code

Friday, May 6, 3pm-5pm – commit to version control, push to production, deploy code

Friday, May 6, 5pm – drinks at John Harvard’s on thoughtbot

How can I sign up?

We have space for 30 students. It’s free for HBS students to attend. All 3 days are required. Please sign up here to reserve your spot and pay a refundable reservation payment.

More about thoughtbot

thoughtbot is a Boston web design, development, and training firm. We have consulted forabout three dozen startups. We run three SaaS products of our own for other developers.Weʼve written a large amount of open source code, run usersʼ groups at our office coveringRuby, mobile development, and web design, and care deeply about community.