Dirty Stuff: The Ruby Learning Trials

Learning To Code All Over Again

The arrogance of maturity, makes me think then re-living an challenge with the benefit of experience will open up a brand new Utopia of wonder and accomplishment. Bah…We shall see. Back in days of old I struggled to get excited about programming but now I have a strong driver. Employment. I have found that I really enjoy promote a concept from start to finish. What would it be like to re-train myself to learn and implement a self-made testing framework using a programming language, in this case Ruby.

Wow, it sounds so boring when I put it like that but, this blog is just for me so it is not about sharing the experience, but rather having an electronic account that I can reflect on.

Step 1 : Start With the Grand Plan.

My grand plan is to be proficient enough in Ruby to be able to create an end-user testing framework useful and flexible enough to transport between organizations I will be working with. Now, whenever I start a project of any substance I tend to divert from the intended path so my first step is to jot down the goals of what I am trying to do and then if I think I am losing my way, a little bit of reflective blog searching will validate, or invalidate whether what I am currently doing fits in the grand scheme of my goals.

So, what do I want to be able to do at the end of this? Below is a very high-level list.

• Learn the Ruby syntax and how best to use the correct ruby code for particular problems.
• Learn how to use Selenium with Ruby
• Learn text parsing concepts
• Learn to inter-operate Ruby with SQL
• Create a test framework using Ruby with sufficient levels of abstraction and flexibility to make it useful and reasonably easy to maintain.

I would consider the above my mission statement but one that is not set in concrete. In fact I would be very disappointed if it remains the same.