I am now a month into the Season of Ruby, so aside from the usual retrospective, it is a good time to reflect on what I have learned to this point. In the last month I have made the following strides:
Re-familiarized myself with git and got more practice using it on a day-to-day basis, creating and merging branches, as well as pushing code to github and heroku.
Learning the basics of Ruby and used it to develop an implementation of the Conway’s Game of Life
I am really enjoying the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, not just for how it teaches Rails, but as much for the developer practices that it encourages.
Gave some thought to the overall roadmap of where I want to go for the next few months. I thought this website gave a good picture and though I will customize it a bit, I think a lot of the areas I want to build on are covered here. For me the areas that I want to focus on in the next few months are a strong foundation in Ruby along with a better understanding of JavaScript (and CoffeeScript), and CSS. I have a few ideas about an app I can put together that will provide an opportunity to strengthen those areas.
What Can Be Improved On
Practice, practice, practice. The tutorial is really helping me put all this together, but I need to keep repeating the lessons to make sure it sinks in. Similar to what I went through with the Ruby Koans, I don’t want to develop a false sense of understanding, so I need to keep writing code and making sure to dig beneath the surface.
What Am I Going To Do To Improve Things
To make sure I am really grokking the lessons from the tutorial, I think it would be a good idea to take a few hours at the end of this iteration and write a simple app. Something similar in complexity to the micro-blogging example in the tutorial. It doesn’t need to be a complete application, but the parts I get to need to be “right”, so I will time-box it at 3 hours. Does not need to be visually pretty.
Iteration 4 Stories/Tasks
Keep chugging away on the Ruby on Rails tutorial. I am through chapter 5, but this is going to be a long week at work, so I would like to be able to get through chapters 6 & 7 this week.
To make sure I am really absorbing the tutorial lessons, develop a simple application without referring back to the tutorial documentation. Going through other documentation is OK, e.g. StackOverflow, Ruby Core Docs, Rails Guides. Time-box it at 3 hours, and follow good developer practices, i.e. use TDD, git/github. Application is TBD, but should be similar in complexity to the micro-blogging example.