Forum: Ruby Re: Mentoring Request

Hi all,

I am a recent graduate. I have been coding in Java professionally for 
the
past one year.

I am trying to get better at Ruby by using it on my hobby projects after
work. I want to accelerate my learning and get better at programming.

Let me know if any of you are open to mentoring. I would need 20 minutes
per month of your time.

A quick high level review of the side-project I am working on, advice on 
my
coding style and concrete, actionable items I can work on to become a
better programmer.


Regards,
Karthik

> I am trying to get better at Ruby by using it on my hobby projects after
> work. I want to accelerate my learning and get better at programming.
>
> Let me know if any of you are open to mentoring. I would need 20 minutes
> per month of your time.

When you're new, it's difficult to access the quality of any would-be
mentor. A better strategy may be to start reading the source of
widely used libraries, and experiment, experiment, experiment. When
things don't make sense, come back to this list with a small code sample
and ask for help.

If a library is widely used, more often than not, it's been refined,
refactored, optimized and documented. Start small so you don't feel
overwhelmed, but don't shy away from looking under the hood of the
larger libraries.

A few for consideration...

  minitest
  rake
  rubygems
  nokogiri
  rack
  rails

Once you get a bit more experience, if you still think a mentor makes
sense, you're in a much better position to judge. Also, don't forget
the value of collaborating on an existing project. Fixing an open bug
and helping document are great ways to learn, add value, and begin
collaborating with more experienced devs.

Most importantly, make it personal. Find an area you're passionate about
and dive in. The rest will follow.

Jon

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 9:30 PM, karthik kottapalli
<kartik.kottapalli@gmail.com> wrote:

> Let me know if any of you are open to mentoring. I would need 20 minutes per
> month of your time.
>
> A quick high level review of the side-project I am working on, advice on my
> coding style and concrete, actionable items I can work on to become a better
> programmer.

*I* couldn't do that in 20 minutes per month.  I think 20 minutes may
be a vast underestimation of what it needs - otherwise you probably
won't get useful feedback.

If you do not want to put a larger burden on any individual you could
start using a public forum such as this or a blog to present your code
and collect feedback.

Kind regards

robert

On Sat, Dec 08, 2012 at 07:58:11PM +0900, Robert Klemme wrote:
> If you do not want to put a larger burden on any individual you
> could start using a public forum such as this or a blog to
> present your code and collect feedback.

That would have an (intended) side effect of being more widely
useful to the others who might learn from questions, mistakes
and advice as well.

The private kind of public counsel is called "support". :)

Hi all,

Thanks for the response. I really appreciate it.

*A better strategy may be to start reading the source of
widely used libraries, and experiment, experiment, experiment. When
things don't make sense, come back to this list with a small code sample
and ask for help.
*

I am starting with a parser. This gem seems to be simple and small 
enough
for me to not get intimidated.
https://github.com/injekt/slop

*you could
start using a public forum such as this or a blog to present your code
*
*and collect feedback.
*
*
*
I will use this mailing list community for code reviews and feedback.
Thanks for the help.

Regards,
Karthik

> I am starting with a parser. This gem seems to be simple and small
> enough for me to not get intimidated.
> https://github.com/injekt/slop

You might compare how slop and trollop approach option parsing

  http://trollop.rubyforge.org/

and then dive down the rabbit hole

  https://github.com/mjijackson/citrus
  https://github.com/cjheath/treetop
  https://github.com/seattlerb/ruby_parser

Jon