[LRUG] Jumping ship to ruby

[D Y]

I did web dev on the microsoft stack for 10 years and then moved to rails 2
years ago. i JUST got a job as a rails dev so i'll briefly share my
experiences with you.

but in short - it's possible but it will take some hard work and maybe a
bit of luck.

for me - it was hard but i really enjoyed every minute of it. it's not just
rails that i grew to love but the whole *nix way of doing things. if i
could do it all over again i would have chosen just a few things to learn
at one time before moving to newer things. for example, just learn how to
use ruby with rspec. when you really grok that, then learn how to use rspec
with rails. but in my case, i just didn't know any better so i learned it
all at once (ruby, rails, rspec, rvm, bundler, git, *nix, vim, zsh, etc)
and at times i was overwhelmed and really confused.

because of the approach i took, it took me awhile before i started to
understand which parts were what. i'm not saying it's impossible, i just
don't think it's the best approach.

i really focused a lot on ruby the language first, and then rails after
that. the way i see it, you need to learn how to THINK in ruby. rails is
just a framework and for me, it was in many ways easier to learn than ruby.
take blocks/procs for example, or meta programming, these concepts were
MUCH harder for me to learn. (note i'm not saying rails is simple or
anything like that)

when i first started out i took a few weeks just reading
railstutorial.comand watching
railscasts.com. once i felt comfortable i did a few small projects and
hosted them on heroku. i also took a class at rubylearning.com and at one
point signed up for mendicant univ (but had to drop out because wife got
pregnant). i also did puzzles that i found online like puzzlenode.com. oh
yeah, also spent some time answering questions on stackoverflow.com. at one
point i was also fortunate enough to find a mentor and that raised my ruby
skills the most.

but definitely, doing projects helped me learn much more than
reading/studying. so once i got to a point where i felt comfortable with
ruby/rails i just kept doing projects. do different types of things - try
parsing websites, do stuff involving background jobs, integrate with some
api's, try processing stuff in parallel, setup your own VPS to host your
websites, setup a postgres database, use a nosql database, etc.

that's pretty much what i did for the past 2 years and at the end of it, i
had a half-decent portfolio of work to share. i job searched for about a
week and took many programming tests. it seems that every rails job i
looked at required a programming test of some sort. luckily, i was used to
doing programming puzzles already so i did alright. one company in
particular liked me enough to hire me :)

anyway, that's my story. hope it helps!

-daniel


On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 10:25 PM, dubflower <dubflower at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all
> I've been a software developer for a few years now, picked up and master
> OOP and DDD, worked with model-view-controller frameworks and know more
> than a thing or two about web development.
> I've been recently picking up ruby at home and am really impressed with
> the language and the echo system. I was wondering what people think of the
> possibility for a developer like me, with experience with statically typed
> languages, to become a ruby developer? How realistic can this move be?
> Would appreciate any response!
>
> regards
> d.f.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
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