ShopKeep engineers work with a wide range of languages and tools to deliver great products to our customers. Our iPad register provides merchants with a beautiful, easy-to-use interface that integrates with a range of cloud-based services that provide long-term business value in terms of data management and reporting.

As part of our Code Smash event, we'd like to give you a chance to work on an app using one of our core tools, Ruby on Rails.

The challenge is detailed on the home page of this Ruby on Rails web application. You'll see it when you run the server and visit the homepage in your browser. Follow the instructions that follow in order to get this application up and running on your machine.

We are really passionate about Ruby and Rails development and are always looking for opportunities to meet developers who use or aspire to use it.

You don't need to be an expert to take part and we will have some of our engineers standing by to help you get started, but if you want to prepare a little beforehand, here are some resources to check out:

• Try Ruby: Browser-based intro to the Ruby language
• Code Academy's Ruby Course: Exercises from introductory to advanced
• Ruby Koans: Test Driven Development approach to exploring Ruby, available online or for download
• Code School's Rails for Zombies: Introduction to Ruby on Rails in a series of video tutorials and exercises

We use the git source control tool and GitHub to manage all our projects. We think GitHub is awesome, and it makes it very easy for you to share your solutions with us.

Sign up for free here and read GitHub's bootcamp for some tips on getting started.

(If you're considering upgrading to a paid account, check if you are eligible for an academic discount.)

Hit the 'Fork' button on the top right of this page to make your own copy of the application that you can work on and submit at the end of the event.

If you're not familiar with command-line git source control, GitHub have clients for both Windows and Mac OS.

See our Getting Started guide for more information on setting up your laptop as a development box; we support Windows, Macs and Linux.

Make sure you have signed up on our event page so we can keep you updated on the event.

If there's something missing or incorrect in this documentation, feel free to open an Issue - or better yet, put in a Pull Request!