RUBY ON RAILS — KICKIN’ IT HARDCORE IN NYC!!!
To most people, the word ‘ruby’ is a just a fancy word for a shiny stone that usually costs a lot of money. To the technology enthusiast, however, the word has a slightly different meaning. And to the web technology enthusiast, the term ‘ruby on rails’ has an even grander meaning, a meaning that can only be described as one of the most bad ass web frameworks known to humankind! Rails, as it is more affectionately called by developers, has been around the web scene for about 8 years or so. But it has only been in recent years, and more, accurately, recent months with the release of rails 3.1.1, that it has really caught fire. The popularity of Rails is largely due to its ease of building sophisticated sites, be it eCommerce or social media, in a ridiculously short amount of time. And it’s not just rinky-dink static sites. Rails is being used to power some of the most popular technologies out there today. Believe it or not, your favorite micro-blogging site, Twitter, was developed in Ruby on Rails.
Knowing all of this and being a technology enthusiast myself, Ruby on Rails intrigued me. One of my good friends, Eric, from college told me about it years ago and he hasn’t stopped ranting and raving about it ever since. RoR was supposed to make coding ‘fun’ again. Really? Coding could be fun? It could be freed from the stain of corporate greed and bureacracy? Hmmmm…..fascinating. So the game now was to dig my heels in and find a community where other Rails ‘youngsters’ like myself could get some help.
Enter: Meetup.com. I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, meetup’s cool and all but it’s hard getting people to come and so many people flake out or don’t show up. Well, sometimes, there are advantages to being a dweller of New York City. We got great food, awesome entertainment and, oh yeah, 8 MILLION PEOPLE!!!! So, you take the combination of meetup and the population of new york and the desire to learn Ruby on Rails and you got…..The NYC on Rails Meetup Group.
http://www.meetup.com/nyc-on-rails/
I was actually put onto this group by another friend of mine, Mike, who built a few sites in Rails. That might not seem impressive in and of itself but this guy had ZERO programming experience before jumping in full throttle. It took a couple weeks but with a lot of diligence and hacking, he got things up and running with full feature functionality.* So I trusted Mike and I believed the NYC On Rails meetup was worth giving a shot. It turned out to be an excellent decision!
Fortunately for me, the very next meetup was a Rails ‘Helpathon’. Typically, programming language enthusiast groups get together for ‘Hackathons’ where they basically have a contest where people get together in groups and build something cool using a specific language and get it all to work in a single day. That’s pretty intense. I’m all for going balls to wall but man, I’m not ready for that. I’m still learning how to swim in the cerulean blue Ruby on Rails waters. So a ‘Helpathon’ was just what I needed. It’s a similar concept but modeled a little differently. You show up with the beginnings of a Rails project which could be for anything. It could be for work, it could be for a class, it could be for your startup, it could be a side project, it doesn’t really matter. The main requirement is that you show up with something in mind. At the beginning of the ‘Helpathon’, you stand up and introduce yourself and explain what it is you’re working on and where you feel you might need help. Then, other more experienced Rails developers who are there will pair up with you and they’ll do their best to guide you through resolving your issues.
Of course, in addition to the idea, there are some other more fundamental requirements you need to have for the ‘Helpathon’. First and foremost, you gotta come with your own gear, meaning, laptop, tablet, whatever it may be. And, ideally, it should already be equipped with Ruby (version 1.9.2), Rvm (Ruby Version Manager — it’s really essential) and the Rails gem (latest version 3.1.1). If you’re a completely new person to Ruby and Rails, I’m sure people will help you out but it just means at least 1 or so configuration before you can get to coding. A lot of people come ready with an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) too. This just means an editor which combines all the essential elements of a project into one place so that you can search, create, edit and delete easily. I personally like to use NetBeans (version 6.9.1) although its no longer being supported for Ruby development.
Interestingly enough, the resident Rails experts who were volunteering their time were mostly employees of a two-year old NYC startup called Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com). For those not familiar with Kickstarter, they are a service which helps to facilitate funding for creative projects. Here’s how it works, you come up with a project, say, an independent movie, which you need funding for. You create a project on Kickstarter, set a funding goal, say, $10,000, and then, you set a time limit from anywhere between 0 – 60 days. Then, it’s up to the project creators to fish around their project on Kickstarter to various people to get them to pledge money. Here’s the awesome part, this isn’t about lending or investing. The creators still maintain 100% control over their respective projects. But here’s the catch, the funding is all or nothing. If you set your funding goal at $10,000 and your time length as 60 days, even if you get $9,990 funded, unless you meet the goal before 60 days are up, you get nothing. So, its in the creator’s interest to set realistic goals and to reach out to as many people as possible. I’m sure you guessed it by now but Kickstarter is written almost entirely in Ruby on Rails.
As I get more and more accustomed to Rails, I’m beginning to understand what Eric was talking about. Coding in Rails is actually fun! Its amazing how much you can get done from a logic perspective in a very short amount time. Rails, from the beginning, has prided itself on a few ideas. One of them is “Convention over Configuration” and that essentially means is that Rails has many built-in assumptions. Once you know what these assumptions are and don’t fight against them, your productivity shoots through the roof. Its no surprise Rails has been adopted by so many tech startups these days. With the whole “lean” philosophy the modus operandi among entrepreneurs, it seems almost a shoe-in that Rails would be chosen as a key part of the programming stack. From my own experience, it is, indeed, impressive and I am beginning to see how powerful it really can be. Without a doubt, Rails is here to say for at least the next few years. It’s brought web programming into the 21st century and shows no signs of slowing down. If you’re interested in learning more about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, below are links to several resources which can help get you started. The other great thing about it is that the community is very strong and committed to helping each other out (as you can see from the ‘Helpathon’). You can everything from free books to the famous “Rails” casts to the Rails guides to even a Rails hotline! So if you got a hunger to learn, get out your plate and start feasting!!!!
RVM (Ruby Version Manager — Mac Only)
PIK (RVM for Windows)
https://github.com/vertiginous/pik
Ruby On Rails Guides
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
“Rails” Casts
Rails Hotline
* For those curious, the site he built is: http://craftcoffee.com. If you like good coffee, you NEED to buy this stuff!!!!
“why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby”? That was unequivocally the best starting point to Ruby I’ve found.
http://www.freetechbooks.com/why-s-poignant-guide-to-ruby-t222.html
Also…you’re right! Ruby is hella-fun.
Ya know, I was thinking about putting that on but I decided to just stick specifically with Rails resources thinking people would eventually hit those Ruby tutorials. No doubt why’s guide is excellent and entertainingly put together. Rails on homey!