the iNKblot

When I was starting out on my project to learn Ruby and Rails, I found several anecdotes, snippets of information, and personal recommendations that helped me make some decisions about how to proceed. In the hope that it will be of some value to other Ruby newbies, I am going to catalogue some of my experiences and put together information that I collected during these early months. This information will include lists of books, web sites, blogs, tutorials, and some tips for dos and donts (that worked for me anyway).

A bit of background

Knowing the perspective and experience of the writer is generally useful – helps understand why they may have chosen this over that. So, while you can read about my background here, it’s worth adding that it’s been about 8 years since @typerlc introduced me to Ruby and python. Shamefully, until very recently, I never really got beyond occasionally perusing a PDF of an early version of the pickaxe book.

Having spent a few years in management, I was beginning to feel like I was living in increasingly rarer layers of the administrosphere. I felt the growing urge to do what I was trained to do as a mathematician, i.e. to return to first principles. Last year I found myself checking the version of Ruby on my macbook and wondering whether I could balance work-life-thethingsyouwasteyourtimeon to ground myself by getting back into development. In December 2009, it seems that I managed to get on with it!

The overview

About 4 months have passed and I have spent an average of 10-12 hours a week at the keyboard. I have also found myself filling the cracks of the day running thought experiments and ruminating on the coding problem of the hour. I set myself a short list of projects to tackle and (as this blog attests), have completed some of them. In other words, I feel that I have some momentum as a beginning Rubyist and am keen to gather more of it!

The top five things I have done to contribute to this outcome:

• Found a list of Rubyists to follow on twitter
• Connected with my local Ruby and Rails user group
• Worked through rubylearning.org’s 8 week foundation course
• Developed a flickr-notifier app using Ruby and Growl
• Constructed this blog using open source first principles

Coming up next

Having put up an overview, the next post in this series will be about the detail of the adventure that has been the past 4 months.