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How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

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Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#11

Post by joshcrews »

james-fend wrote: post #10
saltcod wrote: post #8

Fantastic post. Thanks so much for it. I decided to really dig into Ruby on Rails after Christmas this year, after thinking/talking about it for years. I was thrilled to hear that you really had no programming background—I think a lot of us are in this boat. I watched the Lynda.com videos on Ruby, and the one on Ruby on Rails (both from Kevin Skoglund). I just watched enough of both to get fairly overwhelmed and conf…

Yes, it was the hardest/easiest thing to learn I've ever experienced. Sometimes I was jumping out of my chair and then other times throwing things against the wall. Plenty of times I wanted to just give up.. during those points; I'd step back and go take a break, go for a walk, do something.. other than think. Programming is hard because it's full-time blitz mode thinking. I felt the front part of my brain (is that w…

> Do you have an actual product you want to work on?

Having a real product to build, even if its just to help yourself and not the world is key. It gets you out of the tutorials (which you need to do) and into finding out the main problems you have to solve to get something live.

And once you've got something live, you've built your mental framework that you can "hang" everything else you learn on.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#12

Post by tmh88j »

james-fend wrote: post #10
saltcod wrote: post #8

Fantastic post. Thanks so much for it. I decided to really dig into Ruby on Rails after Christmas this year, after thinking/talking about it for years. I was thrilled to hear that you really had no programming background—I think a lot of us are in this boat. I watched the Lynda.com videos on Ruby, and the one on Ruby on Rails (both from Kevin Skoglund). I just watched enough of both to get fairly overwhelmed and conf…

Yes, it was the hardest/easiest thing to learn I've ever experienced. Sometimes I was jumping out of my chair and then other times throwing things against the wall. Plenty of times I wanted to just give up.. during those points; I'd step back and go take a break, go for a walk, do something.. other than think. Programming is hard because it's full-time blitz mode thinking. I felt the front part of my brain (is that w…

I'd like to add to this simply because I had a very similar experience but with PHP.

There were definitely times when I was extremely frustrated and wanted to give up. There were a couple times when I had 5+ hour sessions and got nowhere, then I'd come back the next day to realize it was a stupid mistake.

One thing I can't stress enough (and James has been saying it too), if you don't have a final site, product, or app in mind you're probably going to get bored and walk away for good. I tried to learn C++ a while back and gave up because I didn't have anything in mind and the boring repetitive exercises lead to nothing in the end.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#13

Post by james-fend »

tmh88j wrote: post #12
james-fend wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it was the hardest/easiest thing to learn I've ever experienced. Sometimes I was jumping out of my chair and then other times throwing things against the wall. Plenty of times I wanted to just give up.. during those points; I'd step back and go take a break, go for a walk, do something.. other than think. Programming is hard because it's full-time blitz mode thinking. I felt the front part of my brain (is that w…

I'd like to add to this simply because I had a very similar experience but with PHP. There were definitely times when I was extremely frustrated and wanted to give up. There were a couple times when I had 5+ hour sessions and got nowhere, then I'd come back the next day to realize it was a stupid mistake. One thing I can't stress enough (and James has been saying it too), if you don't have a final site, product, or a…

"then I'd come back the next day to realize it was a stupid" I couldn't agree with that more!! Come back and you find out all you had to do was restart the 'Rails Server' or simply mis-spelled something.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#14

Post by saltcod »

james-fend wrote: post #10
saltcod wrote: post #8

Fantastic post. Thanks so much for it. I decided to really dig into Ruby on Rails after Christmas this year, after thinking/talking about it for years. I was thrilled to hear that you really had no programming background—I think a lot of us are in this boat. I watched the Lynda.com videos on Ruby, and the one on Ruby on Rails (both from Kevin Skoglund). I just watched enough of both to get fairly overwhelmed and conf…

Yes, it was the hardest/easiest thing to learn I've ever experienced. Sometimes I was jumping out of my chair and then other times throwing things against the wall. Plenty of times I wanted to just give up.. during those points; I'd step back and go take a break, go for a walk, do something.. other than think. Programming is hard because it's full-time blitz mode thinking. I felt the front part of my brain (is that w…

You're 100% right about having something specific to work on. Going through tutorials doen't commit you to anything, and hence never compels you to keep going when things get tough.

The place where I stopped with Michael Hartl's tutorial was on the authentication chapter. I found that whole salt thing completely confusing. Later, I heard about Devise (and others), I thought—Ok, so I'll never actually need to know how to do this—but that's not true. Right on the Github page it says that Devise is complicated and not for beginners. In fact, I'm pretty sure it links back to Michael Hartl's article as an 'easy' way to implement authentication!

That's when I packed it in right there!

Thanks for the advice and for taking the time to write this stuff down. Your freelance site looks amazing for 12 weeks work. Great stuff.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#15

Post by saltcod »

tmh88j wrote: post #12
james-fend wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it was the hardest/easiest thing to learn I've ever experienced. Sometimes I was jumping out of my chair and then other times throwing things against the wall. Plenty of times I wanted to just give up.. during those points; I'd step back and go take a break, go for a walk, do something.. other than think. Programming is hard because it's full-time blitz mode thinking. I felt the front part of my brain (is that w…

I'd like to add to this simply because I had a very similar experience but with PHP. There were definitely times when I was extremely frustrated and wanted to give up. There were a couple times when I had 5+ hour sessions and got nowhere, then I'd come back the next day to realize it was a stupid mistake. One thing I can't stress enough (and James has been saying it too), if you don't have a final site, product, or a…

> Come back and you find out all you had to do was restart the 'Rails Server'

Ha! Hilarious. That's happened so many times.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#16

Post by GnomeChomsky »

Any advice for getting started for someone without a Mac? I remember once trying to learn and immediately stalling out during setup (lame, I know). I have WinXP & Ubuntu, and would like to take a stab at this again no matter how stupid I feel about not even being to able to install the damn stuff to start with.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#17

Post by darushimo »

thanks james and commenters saltcod and tmh88j for saying that the first few weeks are the hardest. I'm banging away at the google python exercises and nearly crying. knowing that other people are going through this headache too gives me a bit of confidence to truck through.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#18

Post by saltcod »

GnomeChomsky wrote: post #16

Any advice for getting started for someone without a Mac? I remember once trying to learn and immediately stalling out during setup (lame, I know). I have WinXP & Ubuntu, and would like to take a stab at this again no matter how stupid I feel about not even being to able to install the damn stuff to start with.

The Ubuntu and Mac setups should be pretty similar. It will be easier for you to get help developing through Ubuntu than XP. Stackoverflow/IRC are your friends when you run into trouble.

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#19

Post by lbotos »

GnomeChomsky wrote: post #16

Any advice for getting started for someone without a Mac? I remember once trying to learn and immediately stalling out during setup (lame, I know). I have WinXP & Ubuntu, and would like to take a stab at this again no matter how stupid I feel about not even being to able to install the damn stuff to start with.

I don't want to sound blunt, but I found the installation process of ruby/python/git on windows to be more painful than necessary. (Last time I tried) It might make sense to try it on Ubuntu as it should be very similar to a mac environment. Good Luck!

Re: How I Learned Enough Ruby On Rails In 12 Weeks To Launch Freelancify

#20

Post by eli »

GnomeChomsky wrote: post #16

Any advice for getting started for someone without a Mac? I remember once trying to learn and immediately stalling out during setup (lame, I know). I have WinXP & Ubuntu, and would like to take a stab at this again no matter how stupid I feel about not even being to able to install the damn stuff to start with.

My advice is to do your development using a Virtual Machine--ideally running the same OS as what your production web server will eventually be running. This gives you the freedom to screw around with your app and server configuration, knowing you can easily roll back to an older version. And it also gives you more confidence that your app will deploy cleanly to your production server and not get hung up on some subtle difference between e.g. Ubuntu and Red Hat.

And, finally, then it doesn't matter whether your host OS is windows or ubuntu; use which you feel most comfortable with.

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