Hey all,

Am taking an immersive class and thought it'd be helpful to have a thread for all ruby/rails related questions / resources. Hopefully this can be helpful for a bunch of 2p2'ers.

Chat soon,
Mariogs

What class are you taking? Is it online?

I'm interested in the course too. I have no interest in learning rails but if you're enrolling into one of those pay $8,000 to get immersed into xyz for 8 weeks courses I definitely want to subscribe to see how it goes.

These guys are located in SF and concentrate on javascript and node.js: http://hackreactor.com/

800 hours @ $17k according to http://www.bootcamps.in/san-francisco/catalyst/. Xhad would probably pop a vain seeing this part:

Not really sure what the appeal of these classes are and I'm not sure why OP would chose to drop college for these either, but you know, the sales pitch is based on the idea that school is a waste of time.

If you think about it, 600, 700, 800 hours really isn't that much time. If you spend just 2 hours a night, every night for one year, you already have 730 hours. I'm guessing you'd have created a project and spent at least a few days where you're staring at some self-made project for 8+ hours at a time (unless I'm pshycho and this is unusual), so after a year, 1000 hours isn't even much of a feat. Hell, even the free online courses ask you for 10 - 15 hours of coding each week for 12 weeks, which is 180 hours + lectures.

The positive is that these classes can apparently get you connected with companies and you have one-on-one mentoring, but even with that, saying you can learn to code in 700 hours sounds a bit... wrong.

I just want to see if someone can retain everything they learn after it's over. I kind of relate those classes to trying to read a 1,000 page book in a weekend. It's technically possible but good luck trying to recollect everything you have learned.

A similar course started recently in Seattle. They guaranteed a $60k+/year job within 6 months or your money back.

I wonder if they'd offer a discount for debugging the Codecademy lessons first...

While the philosophy of these classes doesn't entirely appeal to me, I do see their value. You pay a lot to very quickly become commercially viable at a narrowly focused but in-demand skill set. You then have a very high chance of getting hired for a decent salary afterwards (at least at a few of the programs). You won't be a great programmer after, but you probably will be good enough to do certain specialized, in-demand jobs.

On the flip side, you sacrifice learning fundamentals, which later on could bite you in the ass.

Also, I believe a lot of the people taking them are college grads who decided that they wanted to switch fields and didn't want to commit to doing an MS.

As someone who taught themselves rails last year, with minimal CS experience, I'm just going to say that these classes are a really good idea. With some motivation and being around experienced teachers, you're going to become a useful junior dev with solid fundamentals pretty quickly. You're also probably the kind of person who will go back and learn important things that you missed by not being a comp sci guy.

Like college is great, obviously vital for learning how to think, meeting tons of lifelong friends, etc... but if you can make 180k in the last 3 years of college by dropping out, and not have to pay 120k in tuition or whatever, and be earning closer to 90/100k at that point, that's a big opportunity cost. You're in such a better position at that point earnings wise if you want to stay a developer.

I've also heard from a ton of people I respect as developers that a CS degree screwed them up way more than it helped. Not trying to start a flame war, but most of the crap you'll probably end up doing as a dev doesn't require more than basic fundamentals.

There's no way I'd have given up college, but I also didn't have to pay for it. If I were up to my eyes in student debt and I knew that I wanted to be a developer I'd have strongly considered doing one of those programs if it were an option instead.

Yeah Alex and Nchabazam are right on here. The class before me killed it hiring-wise and, while there's no doubt you sacrifice learning some CS fundamentals blah blah, you're really just focusing on learning a narrow skill-set (in my case, Rails).

Also, there's no doubt in my mind that doing a class in person the way mine is set up is WAY better than trying to learn on your own. Bugs get fixed in minutes, constant access to TA's and the instructor, constant code feedback, a community of likeminded others, a network of past classes, blah blah.

There have been so many times where I've tried learning this on my own and gotten discouraged really quickly because resolving a stumbling block is lolhard when it's just you and what's out on the internet

I would take one of these in a heartbeat in Philly in the summer. I'd stay in school but if after the summer I could actually be programming while I was in school instead of doing a dead end job while I was in school, that would be sweet. These immersion programs like the one in Chicago (starterLeague?) seem like a GREAT opportunity for adult, motivated students.

Yeah, it's really crazy how much you learn when it's what you're doing basically all day every day. Like, we had one week of review, second week was Ruby, third week was Rails and my hw for the weekend has been to create a full-blown application.

I'm making a resume generator. User inputs all his info into a form and creates/formats a resume for him, allows him to save versions, delete resumes, etc. Can only imagine what I'll be able to do 9 weeks from now.

I'm a self-learner, but I use the free resources given out by the colleges. I'm not entirely sure where the anti-CS sentiment comes from. I mean, if you can figure out how to write a simulation of an AI bot scrubbing a floor or write a compiler, I can't figure out why doing CRUD jobs are difficult.

The whole point, as far as my experience goes, seems to be work through some head dingers and figure out how to logic through the problem. I don't see how the learning process of writing and debugging your code and working through some exercises turns out useless or harmful. At least as far as the stuff I learned, the process is absolutely magical and useful to me. With that said, if my goal was specifically to become a web programmer and I had zero interest in anything else, I guess I would call CS useless in a real-world sense, but that isn't because the learning itself is useless, it's because I'd want to learn strictly how to build beautiful websites and I simply don't find the stuff I am learning now interesting.

FWIW, I wasn't really sure if I was making any useful progress until I decided to build my own app. Turned out I learned way more than I initially realized.

My point was more pro-intensive web dev program vs comp sci. I don't see a huge downside, except the opportunity cost of paying for college. I didn't get specifics as to why people seem to think CS is harmful, it wasn't really my opinion.

Anyone have some actual rails talk?

I work on a high traffic rails stack, and am curious what others have in place for caching. We use a home-rolled caching server for caching whole pages, but it's not really maintained and adds some annoying restrictions.

i've taught myself rails starting from eight months ago. i'm not an expert, but i have a decent understanding of it now.

i ran into a problem myself that isn't rails specific, but i hope someone can answer. i've been using git for version control, github to host the repo, and heroku for production. i've recently noticed that i've been pushing sensitive data to github. i've tried adding these files to .gitignore but then it won't track these files anymore and i won't be able to use tools like AWS or Sendgrid on heroku.

i had a bad experience with creating branches and it really messed up my app when i tried to push to heroku my first time, so i basically created a whole new app with the same code and been committing all changes under the master branch. is there a way to solve my problem without creating a new branch for heroku and git pushing that branch to heroku?

Seems like there's a good solution to the problem:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/182074/49746

I don't mean to derail too much, but I would like to hear about the first app you made if you'd be willing to explain.

You can def. find information on it in the LC thread. There is even a link to one article describing some of the build process. I'm going to fix a bit of the code more and open-source the entire thing soon. It is basically a resume aggregation site with the features OP is describing for his hw assignment, except that you can't save versions.

Now I'm sure you're going to ask how long it took, and that is a question I don't know the answer to anymore with the CSS and code changes. As for OP's hw, I'd be pretty surprised if OP did it in less than 25 hours unless RoR writes code for you. The big time-sink in that project would be the SQL, though I'm not sure if he is adding triggers, the size of the intended database, and other stuff like that. Not saying he can't do it in a weekend because he most certainly could, though I'd expect some features to be sliced off before he is done. It's a pretty good project to learn some basic functionality though, and I would guess that there are much better resources for RoR as well.

I've been meaning to start working on a website just to get an understanding of what's involved--particularly e-commerce stuff. I think I'm going to do it in RoR so this thread should be cool.

this solution worked. the only problem was running my app locally, but i just replaced the keys with the real values.

i completed my first project:
www.stumweb.com

github:
https://github.com/chopperop/Stumweb

i'm not really good at graphics, so please don't flame me for it. i know the code is messy, but this is my first project and i learned over time on how to write better code, so i'll eventually get back to refactoring the code and making it more DRY. i'm planning on also writing a post on the best features of my site and explain the code behind them.

this app uses twitter bootstrap, carrierwave plus minimagick, amazon s3, sendgrid using RoR actionmailer, and hosted on heroku. i skipped most of TDD when developing this app. i know i should learn it and i will eventually get back to it. also i don't really know any javascript/jquery. i'm picking it up now with a goal to learn backbone.js one day.

my question is would i qualify for an entry level or junior RoR developer position? if not, what else do you think i am lacking besides what i already mentioned (messy code, little TDD, and no javascipt/jquery experience)?

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-o...-tutorial-book

this is really your best resource for learning to build an app with rails, and it's free. Not ecommerce, but that should be easy to do once you've build a simple app.

To run your app locally, create config/my_custom_initializer.rb, and put it into .gitignore. If .gitignore is giving you trouble, ie it was already tracked etc, check this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...e-not-ignoring

I say it's well worth the effort and you'll learn a lot. The other plus is that websites are easy for people to understand that you did something. You'll also learn really quick if web building is something you want to do with your life. I, for one, would probably be miserable building websites for living, although I do enjoy using CSS and SQL.

If I may posit a different idea: Don't use any pre-built factory stuff. Just begin with a server and a blank text editor and install only the bare minimum you need to get the job and idea done. Since you're not going to create a real-world app, you don't have to worry too much about getting security perfect, which is LOL in RoR anyways, but you'd definitely learn many small things about security, db design, building reusable parts, figuring out trade-offs in tools, etc. Just really focus on understanding the technology and **** shipping.

The final plus is that, with Heroku, you can create apps that aren't commerce, build it in your language of choice, change enough to make it web-friendly, and upload it there for free.

thank you. i love to talk and learn more about RoR. once i finish writing the best features of my site and the code behind them, i'll be sure to post it here!