Day 1 — Ruby Off The Rails
“Surely, it just doesn’t do that for you, right?”
— our entire group several times mobbing through the RoR tutorial just before it did things for you by running one command
Monday.
Eleven twenty-two in the morning. Kick off for the week disasterously late.
Big Hemesh and I grow bored of talking about how to best serve news to the busiest politician in the city (Jezza, if you needed to know), instead eagerly chatting about final projects and watching live coverage of commercial plane routes and industry ships. Some stuff people have designed are pretty wicked.
Venerable coach Ed eventually zooms in to save us from limbo and once all questions were answered, off we went to convene as a group deciding what our goals were for the next two weeks as guinea pigs for Makers’ newest experiment.
Anyone who’s previously gone through Makers or has read the syllabus and has a rough idea of what goes on will know that week 8 is a week focused on Rails, usually developing some form of Yelp clone with its assistance — so it was with a various range of responses when Ed came in during our Friday retro to announce that we’d be trying out something new and that it’d also last two weeks instead of one, effectively removing the practice project week for us and focusing more on operating as a team — learning processes and how we bring each other up, delegating tickets, prioritising tasks and understanding the deployment pipeline being a couple of examples.
Some interesting points that rose during our team huddle:
- Getting the most out of working as a group was a priority for everyone involved (Developer Workflow, XP Values, insert buzzwords here)
- No one was particularly enthused about working with Ruby/RoR for the next two weeks despite now being stranded on a desert island with it
- Energy levels were pretty low during the check-in
We decided that it was best to mob for the first day. We’d already written it off and didn’t want to put too much pressure on ourselves when we had no idea what the heck Rails was even doing. With that in mind, we trotted down to steal one of the meeting rooms and take turns in manning the proverbial wheel, trying to grasp the monstrous file structure that creates itself under one command and the various magic that happens when you run others.
Too often would we go through the Getting Started guide just to get to grips with how it ‘all worked’ and before typing a command saying ‘surely, that doesn’t do all of that’ only for us to be confuddled when it absolutely did do all of that. Several times.
As we got to grips with understanding (rather, accepting) that magic was frequently conjured at the edge of our typing fingertips, it really brought to light why despite the perceived falling popularity of Rails (and Ruby by extension) that it was still a very popular option for startups and companies looking to get their feet off the ground.
If we were able to get forms, parameters and sessions working in what seemed like no time at all, there’s no telling what seasoned developers can conjure to get an MVP up and running. Fellow cohort member Ammar in a different group goes into more detail about said magic here.
Before long, we’d realised that the day had passed and that we’d best finish up with a retro. Something that came up organically within our retro was the need to wield our unnamed mascot to speak. Utilising one’s vocal chords without doing so involves in your soul being devoured by its rapturous gaze.
More seriously (as if we were ever not serious), we’d gained a slightly better understanding of what Rails was doing, how much control it gave you and a deeper appreciation for it. Hopefully with better rested minds and also better health tomorrow, we’ll see much closer we can reach the levels of Merlin.
We might even have a name for the glorious pink bumblebee at the end of it all, too.
