I just finished worked through the newest version of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial and feel like I have a much better handle on Rails 3.2. I do recommend it to get people up-and-running on some of the latest things in Rails.
However, I think that my favorite part of Rails 3 is one of the most hated: Bundler. It really just made things so much easier for me.
But I’m crazy, so don’t worry.
Barry Hess, a “local” Ruby programmer, posted about his experience with the Ruby Users of Minnesota. I’ve attended a number of meetings there as well and my experience, so far, matches much of his … just put a few years into the future since I didn’t attend until 2010. This quote is the one that really stuck out to me:
It turns out being there is well over half the battle.
I can attest that this is true. I have yet to present, but I have met more than a few people just by attending, and this is without any discernible programming skill. I always have a great time up there and enjoy the opportunity to just be around really smart people.
I always hope that some of their “smartness” rubs off on me.
So, get out there and get involved with your local user groups and communities, you’ll never regret it.
I use “local” in quotations because I drive 2+ hours to get to the meetings. Like I said, it is still worth it.
Yeah, it’s December, but I was waxing nostalgic this morning as I rocked my 4 month-old son at 5:15 in the morning. I thought back to what I was hoping to accomplish this year and taking stock in whether I had achieved any of those goals or, more likely, did they change.
From there, I really just stopped thinking for a moment, tried to doze off for a little bit, and then woke up again to a different thought. This time, what do I want to accomplish in the next 90 days, which happens to contain the New Year?
Mainly, it is a similar goal to most years for me: learn how to program. I still haven’t achieved this goal, so I refined it down a little bit more for myself. What do I, SPECIFICALLY, want to accomplish in the next 90 days. After playing around with some lofty goals, I decided to force myself into a reality check … let’s set a really small goal and accomplish that first before we get ahead of ourselves (that was myself talking to … myself).
“Alright, self,” my self said, “so where do we want to go from here?”
That’s when it hit me: I had a goal sitting right there, started but never finished, which would work very nicely to get the ball rolling.
Enter Learn Ruby The Hard Way.
I am a few exercises in, started and then aborted maybe a month back, and the kind of goal I need to achieve to get some momentum going for myself. It is very simple (in concept) and something that I can achieve if I just put myself to it.
So there you have it: in the next 90 days I aim to finish Learn Ruby the Hard Way. After that, my selves shall reconvene to figure out what is next.
Here is what I’m currently using for Ruby development on OS X Lion.
That’s the basics of it. I’m toying around with PostgreSQL and MySQL at the moment and trying out Sequel Pro for managing the few MySQL servers I work with for clients.
That’s about it for now.
I’ve seen a few search queries coming here asking about GetBundles and Lion. Well, I grabbed the source from Eric Danielson’s fork of GetBundles at GitHub to get it to work properly. Mainly he added a change to the regex that allows https for GitHub, which was failing for me before.
Hope this helps someone.