Day Two — Ten Points To Rubyclaw!
First I want to shout-out to my fantastic team, our lovely coach Ed and our still nameless team mascot (the abandoned pink-fish from the graduate mezzanine upstairs).
Chris, who should moonlight as a screenwriter or standup comedian alongside his bright-future career as a dev, set the bar impossibly high with yesterday’s post. It’s weird enough to be writing something without curly braces, but here goes…
So far we have cover two languages at Makers Academy: Ruby & Javascript. Ruby is very tidy and reads almost like English. Lots of people preferred Ruby for the above reasons. I didn’t. I had delved into Javascript before joining Makers Academy and I love it’s sloppy-infuriating-chaos:
‘3’ + 3 / 2 = 31.5
3 + ‘3’ / 2 = 4.5
Not to mention, [] == [] => false which is grounds for a philosophical discussion. As someone in the above cohort said; Ruby is like a controlling girlfriend while Javascript encourages you to buy a motorcycle and wheel your way across France. (If you were to personify a programming language into your other half.)
However, Rails has completely changed my opinion of Ruby. Writing a full-stack application is now only marginally harder than doing an online food shop. If I were to build myself a professional website (for professional purposes or otherwise) I would definitely use Rails. And it would save me at least a couple hundred hours of my life. Pretty cool huh?!
Just to clarify: Rails is super-quick to use. Not to understand.
Today Reena & myself worked on a signup feature whilst Hemesh & Chris sorted our deployment pipeline. Whilst they were completing our Trello post-it tasks like they going out of fashion Reena & myself ultimately decided to delete our day’s code. Turns out there’s an easier way. And of course there is. It’s Rails. However, we gained a strong fundamental insight into the MVC structure.
Thoughts on the new syllabus: This week feels different from the other weeks and it’s super refreshing. Previous weeks felt like trying to rush your way into a lecture whilst scraping your notes off the floor. This week we actually have time to sit-down and read them. It’s nice to have a shared goalposts, but the freedom to go research and create as we please.
A final reflection: I guess the capabilities of any programming language are largely determined by the the strength of it’s libraries and the vigour of it’s open source communities. Rails and RSpec are definitely two wins for Ruby. Version 5 of Rails was released yesterday nearly 14 years after it’s first release — and I’m glad they’re still making it.
Well that’s it for today really and as for tomorrow…
