Matthew Newell

Prepared for the Indianapolis Ruby Brigade

September 2013

Ruby Newbie

My First Year

Lessons Learned

Overview

About Me

Why

How

Lessons Learned

Site Demonstration

About Me

Career: The “Suit” in technical/creative environments

Industry Duration

Visual Effects 1992 to AFO

Internet Startup 1995 to bubble burst

Defense 2000 to current

Who Creates Value?

The Suit: Plan, Manage (cost, schedule, risk, scope), Coordinate,

Customer Development, Marketing, Payroll, Benefits

The Programmer: Makes the Product

Cost to make stuff

Industry Thing 1990 2013

Visual Effects Feature Film Crash Sequence $2 million $100,000

Internet

StartupBuild an Online Community $1 million $500

Defense Build an Aircraft $$ $...$$$$$

As technology commoditizes an industry,

you don’t need as many “suits”.

Why I am Learning…

to Program– Professional Improvement: Closer to Value Creation

– Aspiring Entrepreneur

to Program Ruby– Availability of resources (online, books, people)

– Low barrier to entry, lot of upside

– Local community

– Culture

– Fun

Why Program

“If you want to invest two years in something that will

help you, you would do better to learn how to hack than

get an MBA”– Paul Graham, Y Combinator Founder

“Money Doesn’t Matter”– Matt Gordon, Expected Behavior

Why

How I am Learning

Method Example Pro Con

Online Classes CodeSchool.comNo

configuration

Hard to apply

knowledge

CookbooksAgile Dev

with RoRInstant gratification Fake smart

Online tutorials VarietyStale,

Quality varies

User groups Rails Brigade Fire hose

Mentor Everything IMA Pest

Lessons Learned about Learning

Learning is non-linear

Repetition Repetition Repetition Repetition

Make learning your day job

Have a pet project

Make Learning Ruby Your Day Job

Fun

Benefits

Self

Benefits

Work

X

How to Make Learning Ruby Your Day Job

If PC, get Cygwin

Write file management utilities

gem install spreadsheet

Use git

Become extremely productive

Ask for forgiveness, not permission

Requires ‘non-technical-desk-job’

Site Demonstration

Agile Web Development with Rails 4 (Depot)

Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson

Learn Web Development with Ruby on Rails

Michael Hartl

Site Demonstration

Learned/Applied From the Books

Competency Prag

Prog

Learn

Ruby

Online Community (registration, user accounts, views) X

Online Store (products, cart, checkout) X

Bootstrap CSS X

Test Driven Development X X

JavaScript (very little) X X

Git / GitHub X X

Heroku X X

Neither book is strong on Active Record (too light or too heavy)

Bold = better

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