Matthew Newell prepared a presentation for the Indianapolis Ruby Brigade in September 2013 about his first year learning Ruby. He discussed his career background in technical and creative environments, why he chose to learn programming and Ruby specifically, how he went about learning through various methods, and lessons learned. He demonstrated a website he created that applied concepts from Ruby on Rails and other books, showing competencies in building an online community, store, and using tools like Bootstrap, TDD, Git, Heroku and more. He advocated making learning Ruby one's "day job" through projects and constant practice.

1. Matthew Newell
Prepared for the Indianapolis Ruby Brigade
September 2013
Ruby Newbie
My First Year
Lessons Learned

2. Overview
About Me
Why
How
Lessons Learned
Site Demonstration

3. About Me
Career: The “Suit” in technical/creative environments
Industry Duration
Visual Effects 1992 to AFO
Internet Startup 1995 to bubble burst
Defense 2000 to current

5. Who Creates Value?
The Suit: Plan, Manage (cost, schedule, risk, scope), Coordinate,
Customer Development, Marketing, Payroll, Benefits
The Programmer: Makes the Product

6. Cost to make stuff
Industry Thing 1990 2013
Visual Effects Feature Film Crash Sequence $2 million $100,000
Internet
Startup
Build an Online Community $1 million $500
Defense Build an Aircraft $$ $...$$$$$
As technology commoditizes an industry,
you don’t need as many “suits”.

7. Why I am Learning…
to Program
– Professional Improvement: Closer to Value Creation
– Aspiring Entrepreneur
to Program Ruby
– Availability of resources (online, books, people)
– Low barrier to entry, lot of upside
– Local community
– Culture
– Fun

8. Why Program
 “If you want to invest two years in something that will
help you, you would do better to learn how to hack than
get an MBA”
– Paul Graham, Y Combinator Founder
 “Money Doesn’t Matter”
– Matt Gordon, Expected Behavior

9. Why

10. How I am Learning
Method Example Pro Con
Online Classes CodeSchool.com
No
configuration
Hard to apply
knowledge
Cookbooks
Agile Dev
with RoR
Instant gratification Fake smart
Online tutorials Variety
Stale,
Quality varies
User groups Rails Brigade Fire hose
Mentor Everything IMA Pest

11. Lessons Learned about Learning
 Learning is non-linear
 Repetition Repetition Repetition Repetition
 Make learning your day job
 Have a pet project

12. Make Learning Ruby Your Day Job
Fun
Benefits
Self
Benefits
Work
X

13. How to Make Learning Ruby Your Day Job
 If PC, get Cygwin
 Write file management utilities
 gem install spreadsheet
 Use git
 Become extremely productive
 Ask for forgiveness, not permission
Requires ‘non-technical-desk-job’

14. Site Demonstration

15. Agile Web Development with Rails 4 (Depot)
Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson
Learn Web Development with Ruby on Rails
Michael Hartl
Site Demonstration

16. Learned/Applied From the Books
Competency Prag
Prog
Learn
Ruby
Online Community (registration, user accounts, views) X
Online Store (products, cart, checkout) X
Bootstrap CSS X
Test Driven Development X X
JavaScript (very little) X X
Git / GitHub X X
Heroku X X
Neither book is strong on Active Record (too light or too heavy)
Bold = better

17. Feedback