Refreshing Ruby

It’s been a month since I last wrote a proper coding blog, and in that time, so much has happened! I learned JavaScript, did a project week, and now this weekend have come back to my Ruby roots as the entire cohort works as a team to use rails to build a replica of Facebook.

Regarding my initial experience of JavaScript, I can do no better than to quote Makers Academy coach Roi Driscoll:

“Javascript week is a very special time at Makers. For me it was the first time I wanted to throw things at the projector and scream ‘HERESY’. It was not my beloved Ruby, and I was not happy about it.
I felt strangely codeblind — unable to make sense of all the curly brackets, parenthesis, semicolons and the damn word ‘function’ here there and everywhere. My reaction was to fill my soul with a deep and passionate hatred of Javascript as a language, and anyone involved with it was the Devil. I was wrong.”
I did eventually learn to do cool things in JS, but what a sweet relief to be back in the land of Ruby, where there is a useful method for anything we could possibly want.

This weekend’s challenge was a delight: called Ruby Refresher, it was simply a list of about 40 puzzles we had to solve using Ruby methods. I did panic at one that asked for the square root of a number — thinking I was in JavaScript land where there are no methods — sorry, functions — and was imagining creating the method from scratch. A quick Google search reminded me of what I already knew: ‘sqrt’ is a handy Ruby method.

So I had a lovely romp in the park with my old, dear friend Ruby this weekend and now forward to making as many puns on the word rails (“keeping it rail”, “the holy gRail”) as I can possible manage.