Yes, we still teach Ruby!
But I thought Ruby is dead….
Recently I completed the Le Wagon FullStack Bootcamp; more recently I was hired to be the Community Manager in Tel Aviv; and even more recently I interviewed a prospective student. I sent these notes back to my team:
“It seems like her biggest concern is being job-ready/desirable. She was unsure that Ruby is a desired language.”
I could probably copy-paste these two lines for 95% of prospective students. It usually goes something like this: “I really like the sound of this program. I can see the results and the numbers speak for themselves. But why is the course teaching Ruby? Isn’t Ruby a dying language? I thought Ruby is for beginners. Nobody hires Ruby programmers anymore, right?”
Now, let me remind you that 99 percent of these folks don’t know the difference between a terminal and The Terminator!
In fact, I had asked the exact same questions before sending in my payment for the course. And, like most of our prospective students, I was considering another bootcamp, one focused on Python and Data Science.
Thank God for my dear friend Madeline. Madeline attended Le Wagon in Brussels about nine months before me. Madeline has never had a filter. So, when I told her I was comparing Le Wagon to the other program, which is run by a top-20 university in the U.S., she gave me her honest opinion. My concerns were that Web Development was on the decline, Data Science on the ascent, that having the “name” of the university would go further than “some French startup”, and, most importantly that Ruby on Rails was a dying framework built on a dead language.
Madeline’s response:
WARNING: graphic language to follow!
So what were the magical words that convinced me that Web Development and especially Ruby on Rails are worth learning in 2018 (and that there’s no end in sight for this lucrative career path)? After talking to Madeline I spent a weekend flooding all my available Slack channels with similar questions. These were the responses I received from seasoned developers:
“I would say both the full stack market and the data science market are just about equally hot right now. With this one exception. It appears that ruby is losing a little ground to the javascript frameworks. But Ruby is still in demand. Python does seem to be gaining as its what a lot of the data science tools are built around like Spark, some pieces of Google Cloud etc. It may depend on what kind of work your looking for. If you learned ruby you might be able to freelance more. If you learned data science your most likely going to work for larger companies.”
“I think both (web dev and data science) are just as popular and will be equally popular in the future. But Data Science is a little more specialized so you may make more but there will be fewer options vs full stack ruby/javascript/java. Those jobs are everywhere”
I pushed back again with those fatal words, “My first thoughts were that Ruby seems easy. And I did read that it’s ceding ground.”
I’ve been paid to write code in every language you’ve heard of- they don’t matter; learn how to debug and problem solve, be thorough that is all. Ruby / javascript will be more small biz, freelance, startup oriented, data science will be larger corp type work. You have to be a well funded startup or a large corp to need a data scientist. Since data science is a sub set / speciality you can pick that up after you learn to code.
These answers may suggest that I should’ve forgotten about Ruby, learned Javascript, and never looked back. But here’s the thing: I already tried that.
In 2016, I attended a separate bootcamp in the U.S. It was a part-time bootcamp that was geared towards working professionals who wanted to make a career change, and it was a great first experience. I learned how to think like a programmer and we solved very challenging problems using lower-level languages like C and PHP, in addition to Javascript. The problem was that our assignments were in a pre-configured environment. The server was built was for us and the framework was totally structured. This was great for class challenges, we could complete a task and see something really working. And I even felt like I could now build masterful apps and websites all on my own.
Then came my personal project. I fired up my text-editor and got to work. I had built some nice looking projects in JavaScript using APIs, so I figured that if I found the right APIs, I could make a really useful app. But because I had only previously worked from a pre-configured environment, I had no understanding of application architecture. So when it came time to set up a server on my own, organize my model-view-controller framework, connect to a database, or implement an API, I felt like a boneless athlete trying to train my muscles for an upcoming race. Maybe I was strong but my strength was fundamentally useless.
And this is the beauty of Ruby on Rails. It allows you to learn by doing. From the beginning, you have a built-in architecture that allows you to hit the ground running. It pre-configures certain settings so that you don’t need to worry about getting bogged down in minutiae. Everything works, until you break it. Just a few lines of code, and you’ve got a fully operational app, which means you can spend your time building out the functionality and experimenting, instead of scratching your head over obscure set-up or compiling errors.
This focus on building projects, instead of mastering configuration settings, is exactly what potential employers will be looking for. They understand that you are a beginner. If you can show them that you understand the overall structure of a framework, and more importantly display a finished, elegantly written project, they will want to invest in you.
To be a programmer is to be a lifelong student. The day you start a bootcamp is the beginning of the rest of your life and you will never stop having to learn new languages, new frameworks, and new processes.
Ruby on Rails is like a 101 course led by the department head.
Not only does Ruby on Rails allow for lightening quick development of fully functioning programs, it also allows for highly sophisticated and efficient programming. The internet is full of critics writing about how Ruby is “crazy easy”, as if that’s a disadvantage when it comes to its capabilities. Here are a handful of companies proving these critics wrong: Airbnb, Github, Scribd, Shopify, Hulu, Twitter, Twitch, SoundCloud, Hulu, Zendesk, Square, Highrise, Cookpad, and Basecamp. These are just some of the hundreds of thousands of companies, across the world, using Ruby.
Ruby isn’t just for consumer facing solutions or companies working on their MVP. In Israel, Gett, Google, WeWork, Fiverr, Cloudinary, Symantec, and many more are using Ruby.
In conclusion, will learning Ruby on Rails make you a desirable candidate? Not exactly. Your ability to master the fundamental concepts of programming will make you a desirable candidate. Ruby on Rails will just make that mastery much more accessible and focused. In other words, Ruby on Rails will make it “crazy easy”.
Cyrille Labesse was one of my teachers at Le Wagon but he was more than that- he was a Ruby God and dinosaur. Cyrille has been a Ruby developer for more than fifteen years, longer in fact than the Rails framework has existed. He had the following to say:
When prospective students say, “I’m worried this bootcamp isn’t enough to get a job..”
You’ll never go from totally clueless about code to Senior Software Architect in 9 weeks. Every discipline takes time and hard work, this isn’t magic. That said, a coding bootcamp will bombard you with all the tools that you need in order to understand and be part of an ecosystem and get you ready to be part of a team. We are all students and you will always be learning, even in a job.
I’d trade a person who just came out of a bootcamp and is eager to learn over a senior that thinks he knows it all anytime. Getting a job is all about the attitude, thirst for understanding, increasing your know-how, and curiosity for the unknown.
When prospective students say, “I worried that Ruby is “easy” as a bad thing…”
Sure, coding is so easy as it is that I’ll start with Brainfuck instead of Ruby, because when learning something, we should always start with the hardest and most painful thing, in order to drop out as soon as possible. (Insert ironic twist phrase here)
Ruby is a very easy language to learn, and that’s exactly why you should start with it.
When prospective students say, “The market is saturated with Ruby developers, Ruby being so accessible means I’m too far behind…”
It’s so saturated that LinkedIn headhunters are filling up my inbox with job offers. People need developers, the world needs developers, and Ruby/Rails helps transform ideas into products so easily, and that’s what everyone is looking for.
When prospective students say, “I’m worried learning Ruby on Rails isn’t as valuable as learning Node.js or Django…”
At LeWagon, learning Ruby/Rails is a side-effect of learning how to code. Our focus is teaching you how to code, and Ruby is the perfect means for that end. Other bootcamps focus on teaching you these languages because it looks “up-to-date” on the resume, but have to adapt the program constantly. LeWagon boasts 200 batches so 200 precise curriculum tweakings aimed at teaching you better and faster what you came to learn: code.
And if you still don’t believe it:
