railsbridge/docs

The RailsBridge Documentation Project is a small Ruby web application that hosts the teaching materials used at RailsBridge workshops. RailsBridge is a community organization that runs free programming workshops aimed at people who are underrepresented in tech. The app is deployed publicly and serves two main collections of content: installation guides that walk new students through setting up Ruby, Rails, and Git on their own computers, and beginner curriculum materials for learning web development with Rails. The installation guides cover the many different combinations of operating system and version that workshop attendees might arrive with. Because a room full of students brings an unpredictable mix of Mac, Windows, and Linux machines at various versions, the guide must branch through many paths to handle each case. The curriculum includes a project called Suggestotron, which is the introductory Rails application students build during the workshop. The content files are stored in a sites directory organized by language code. English content lives under sites/en. Spanish and other languages get their own subdirectory and can be served separately by setting an environment variable before starting the server. Each content file can be written in a few formats: a custom step-based format designed for workshop instructions, standard Markdown, or a slide deck format. Running the app locally takes two commands after cloning the repository. The application is built with Sinatra, a lightweight Ruby web framework. The documentation content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, meaning anyone can reuse or adapt it with credit, while the application code itself is under the MIT license.