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Ruby on Rails in a week

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Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#71
post #31

Asking someone to learn a brand new framework/language in a week as part of a job interview is pretty harsh.

It really depends on the experience. If you're a beginner and it's your first web job, sure, that's harsh/unreasonable. If you're coming from years of python/JS like the author and soon for a senior-ish position? I don't see anything wrong with it. (As a task itself. As part of an interview... that's complicated)

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#72
post #64

I took a rails job by accident- I knew rails was in use but I was interviewed in Go and talked about new things going on in Go micro services. I didn’t expect 40 hours a week of rails / ember JS work and that’s my fault. I have 12 years with Django and I was shocked there wasn’t the equivalent of the Django tutorial. Everyone says the rails tutorial is good and I’m sure it’s worth the money but no one at work endorse…

Would you say Rspec is better than the Python equivalents like behave or pytest-BDD? Curious as I've never worked with Ruby/Rails but I'm aware there are some things that are way ahead of other toolchains (and others that are way behind as you've noted).

RSpec is definitely better, but I've mimicked it this way with pytest because I didn't like each Given/When decorator in pytest-bdd requiring a separate method to setup. It was way too verbose. I want to be able to quickly nest them, like in RSpec.

So I do:

  TestSomeMethod:
      TestWhenDateProvided:
           def test_it_does_not_use_system_date(fixture, ...):
           assert ...

      TestWhenDateNotProvided:
           def test_it_uses_system_date(fixture, ...):
           assert ...

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#73
> Blocks are one of the most confusing, yet most powerful elements of Ruby. They allow you to group expressions, save them to a variable, and even pass them to a method. I’m still getting used to blocks and realizing their usefulness, but overall I feel that they condense a lot of code, and also make code more reusable and extensible.

Agreed re: confusion! I've been using Ruby (and Crystal) for years and I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that while I fully understand how to _use_ blocks, I haven't really truly grokked them. I kinda use them and use yield and it all works.

But! Something clicked recently, and I'm not sure why it took so long (maybe it was lots more experience with JavaScript lately?) and I feel kinda dumb that I just realized this:

Blocks are just anonymous functions. That's it. Yield just means "call the anonymous function that was passed in". Yield with arguments (which always confused the hell out of me) is, again, just calling that same anonymous function with arguments.

(I think?)

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#74
post #31

Asking someone to learn a brand new framework/language in a week as part of a job interview is pretty harsh.

When interviewing juniors, I make them install a new-to-them-language and the job interview exercise is "do this one thing". Since they're juniors, I give them a bulleted list of things to do (so there's no trick). I'm testing to see if they can

1. read and follow directions

2. read other people's documentation

3. ask for help

4. poke around and try things

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#75
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's definitely noticeable when you try to learn a newer framework with a much smaller community and less opinions. You could end up Googling for what you might think is a common thing to solve only to find zero answers in sight I have felt this exact way when I'm Googling for problems running Rails in modern cloud environments. It seems like there are loads of problems that are largely unsolved in the community at…

that seems beyond the scope of rails itself. why would you want to complicate deployment as a newbie? what problems are you facing that containerization specifically solves for you, rather than deploying to a (virtual) server directly? and why not heroku to start?

I'm a Rails newbie, not a software newbie. I was brought in as an engineer with no Rails experience but deep Cloud experience to help break a large complex monolith and yes, we're running into the same "DHH's way or the highway" quagmire that infests the Rails world, as mentioned in a sister comment.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#76
post #20
post #14

Rails is in a really good place. When I learned it back in 2015 there were so many resources for learning, it felt like every time I had a specific problem related to a feature I was implementing there was either a railscasts or gorails video on it, along with 10 blog posts and stack overflow results. I can only imagine how much better it is now. It has been one of the only semi-modern learning experiences where I wa…

> It's definitely noticeable when you try to learn a newer framework with a much smaller community and less opinions. You could end up Googling for what you might think is a common thing to solve only to find zero answers in sight I have felt this exact way when I'm Googling for problems running Rails in modern cloud environments. It seems like there are loads of problems that are largely unsolved in the community at…

Almost every modern Rails app runs containerized. Heroku is containerized! What are you having trouble with?

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#77
post #13

Nah. In a week, some component will need a security update, and your "hello, world" will break.

Rails has been relatively consistent over the past 10 years with few breaking changes, especially compared to most other frameworks.

Yep, most people get burned by other gems that aren't as thoughtful.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#78
I am one of those obnoxious people who is trying all the time new web technologies, without deepening the skill for years in just one. Out all the frameworks I have used (Django,Phoenix,Node/Express in all its flavors,.NET Core, Echo) Rails is by far the one in which I feel more productive. Ruby is a lovely language, the ecosystem is mature, there is always a gem for everything and for the kind of applications I do (just 1-3 developers) Rails suits the needs perfectly. All the rest have been very solid and enjoyable frameworks (except for the Node-based ones, sorry) but I still prefer Rails.

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#79

I am one of those obnoxious people who is trying all the time new web technologies, without deepening the skill for years in just one. Out all the frameworks I have used (Django,Phoenix,Node/Express in all its flavors,.NET Core, Echo) Rails is by far the one in which I feel more productive. Ruby is a lovely language, the ecosystem is mature, there is always a gem for everything and for the kind of applications I do (…

Just curious why the (negative) callout for Node-based frameworks like express? How, technically, were they inferior to Ruby (or any of the other languages you listed)?

Re: Ruby on Rails in a week

#80
post #14

Rails is in a really good place. When I learned it back in 2015 there were so many resources for learning, it felt like every time I had a specific problem related to a feature I was implementing there was either a railscasts or gorails video on it, along with 10 blog posts and stack overflow results. I can only imagine how much better it is now. It has been one of the only semi-modern learning experiences where I wa…

This 10,000 times. And it’s not just Rails, the quality of the Rails documentation made an impact on the Ruby community that was generally replicated. Compare that to the JavaScript world where cornerstone, insanely popular libraries will have documentation that covers roughly 10% of a library’s API surface area and maybe one simple example that doesn’t cover production use cases. And dozens of out of date Medium blo…

I've been doing Javascript for a long time and have rarely run into issues with a lack of documentation. Maybe in projects with like 10 stars on Github ran by a single developer but in all of the major Node projects, you're going to have ample documentation and support for implementing said libraries. Just my take.
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