Category Archives: Programming

As this summer wraps up, I’d like to thanks Arlington Ruby for their Unconference and Steel City Ruby Conf for putting together great events.

The events were both accessible and affordable, the latter being unfortunately uncommon for many conferences. Also, while both events offered tracks that appealed to intermediate and expert Rubyists, they also offered content that very much met the goal of getting more people involved with the language and programming in general. Finally, the group of attendees and companies represented at both events made for a great time!

Some (Slightly Related) Ruby Links

CommanLineFu – A great resource for command line tricks and wizardry.  Their twitter feed that only tweets content over the 100 vote threshold is particularly useful for identifying the best of the best.  Of course if we are going to dive into command line tricks this XKCD is relevant.

RubyMotion – iOS development with Ruby.

Over the last year or so I’ve dabbled in learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  Most of those attempts were one or two week long stints, and though these brief introductions have provided a superficial overview of the language, I’m a million  miles away from being able to call myself a Rubyist.

A bit back, I stumbled across an  article on Hacker News where a developer completely immersed himself in the language for a month.  Now a month isn’t a very long amount of time, especially with a full time job, but with a summer lull in grad school, I liked the idea enough that I’m committing to a similar regimen.

I’m going to spend the next 8 weeks consuming as much Ruby as I possibly can.  I’m going to provide weekly status updates to keep myself honest and to track my progress.  At the end of the 2 month stint I’m going to provide a breakdown of which books I thought were useful, any learning hacks I discover, and a compilation of resources I found to be useful.

I’ll provide my first update at the end of this weekend.  Wish me luck!