Hi there! You probably don't know me, I am fairly quiet on github and less than interesting in twitter from a professional developer's perspective. I do have something interesting to say though: I am a novice programmer that just scored an awesome job in a rails focused company (namely Cubox) and has to learn the framework from scratch.
One of the hot topics in the Rails world nowadays is the fact that rails (3.0 and, more notoriously rails 3.1) has apparently gone from being a low-entry novice framework to a more experienced-programmer oriented tool*. Is this true? And if it is: is that necessarily a bad thing? I have, obviously, no authority to comment properly on this, but maybe this blog - while being only one particular case study - can still contribute something to the debate.
What's my background, you say? Well, I've toyed around with computer programming for maybe something like three years. I started with - sigh - Visual Basic .Net on a private university, that.... didn't last. Basically after my first semester I decided that learning stuff on my own was way faster, less expensive and much more fun, so I dropped out somewhere in the middle of my second semester and started toying around with Ruby for a litte while. It actually didn't hook me up at that point so I switched to Python, at which point I got my first computer programming job at a local company called Netgate, working with an Asterisk-based system written - mostly - in Python called Expand.
Now, I spend a lot of time reading about computer programming, so of course I knew about rails, some of my best friends are ruby programmers, and that definitely helped pushing me to finally apply for a job in Cubox, I am currently finishing my third week as a ruby/rails developer.
So, to summarize on my previous knowledge: I know next to nothing about professional web development (or I do, maybe, a bit, but I've never done anything that even resembles a complete web application), I am fairly proficient with Python, I've had sporadic love affairs with Ruby over the last few months until I found myself working in ruby fulltime three weeks ago.
Next post should include the highlights on what it's been like so far, ups, downs, brain damages and heavenly joys of working with Ruby on Rails 3.0 while being a complete noob. :)
Cheers!
* This is a brief but interesting article on the subject
The whole "barrier to entry" stuff is just noise.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who half-heartedly tried to learn Rails 2.x and ultimately learned Rails 3.0, I think the entry barrier is only shrinking. The only language I knew before jumping into Rails was some PHP I inherently learned from playing with vBulletin installations. Never made an application in my life.
What seems to make a framework hard aren't its opinionatedness, but the resources available to consult to learn about its opinionatedness and fundamentally how to use the framework.
Rails has great resources from Michael Hartl's tutorial, Apress' Beginning Rails 3, and PragProgrammer's Rails book. Railscasts and the value of just staying on top of, say, reddit.com/r/ruby and r/rails are just sugar on top.
I started learning Rails over the Christmas break working on a somewhat ambitious project for someone with zero experience. I learned in heaps. I've made random hobby/educational apps since then, and now I'm working on porting my large vBulletin forum to Rails and it's going really well.
Once you get a few basic intuitions down, you'll soon feel like you can do anything. You can figure out the refactoring/optimizations as you go.
For a long time, I avoided Vim because I'm not a hardcore programmer and always heard it was not newbie-friendly. But then, last night, I saw it came installed with 'vimtutor'. Just a 30 minute play-along-with-me tutorial. Everything made sense and I could see exactly how it'd increase my productivity. I spent another hour just reading various blog posts and opinions on Vim. Now I'm caught up and already use Vim for my Rails programming. Just shows how a thoughtful tutorial is capable of toppling a barrier to entry if the underlying software is crafted in an intuitive manner.
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