Andrew Cox
∞ Oct 25, 2011

Ruby Tuesdays

Since switching jobs in May, I’ve done very little Ruby development. I have, however, been to several Ruby and Rails conferences that have kept my interest in Ruby alive. If anything, I think I’m even more eager to get back into coding more regularly.

There are a few real Ruby projects that I plan on digging back into very soon, but I also want to set aside some time to learn and keep up with the rapidly-evolving Ruby ecosystem.

There are just so many great resources in the Ruby community these days that it takes a concerted effort just to keep up. My attempt at a solution is to batch my Ruby learning into one day a week. Naturally, that day of the week should be Tuesday. My plan is to spend 1-3 hours each Tuesday digging into some podcasts, blogs and code.

Resources to learn from each week

Here’s my initial list of resources I plan to draw from:

My first Tuesday

So, tonight was my first Ruby Tuesday. Um … wow! 1 hour is nowhere near enough time to cover all of these resources.

I tried to listen to the 1-hour Ruby Rogues podcast while reviewing the Ruby5 notes. It was a little hard to divide my attention between the two and I didn’t even finish reading through the Ruby5 notes. I did end up learning a lot of useful stuff though, so the hour spent was very worthwhile.

It’s clear that 1-hour a week isn’t nearly enough to keep up with Ruby. I’m going to need to decide on the depth and breadth of my learning. I think next week I’ll do a few things differently:

  • Start with the week’s Railscast
  • Next read Practicing Ruby
  • Finish with the Ruby Weekly list
  • Spend 2-3 hours instead of 1

That will at least give me a different set of resources than this week and I can see which provide the biggest value for my time. We’ll see how it goes!