Forum: Ruby Ruby Project Ideas to get someone hired.

I have started learning Ruby this past week and have down the basics of
loops, filters, strings, arrays, hashes, functions, etc.

Since I have no professional experience with the language, I figured I
would complete a few projects on my own and see if I can get hired
somewhere.

What kinds of small projects might a beginning Ruby programmer take on 
that
would demonstrate enough skill to get hired?  Is Ruby code enough or 
would
it have to be an actual Rails app?

p.s.  I have no idea how to deploy a rails application - environment 
seems
impossible to set up - yes I have followed more than 5 tutorials 
exactly.
 Prob doesn't help I'm on a Windows 64 bit machine as it seems certain 
dll
files and other things get messed up easily.

Colby

A good idea is to switch to a Unix OS first if you plan to get hired ;)

On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 04:15:13AM +0900, Colby Callahan wrote:
>
> p.s.  I have no idea how to deploy a rails application - environment seems
> impossible to set up - yes I have followed more than 5 tutorials exactly.
>  Prob doesn't help I'm on a Windows 64 bit machine as it seems certain dll
> files and other things get messed up easily.
>
> Colby

--
Markus Schirp

Phone:   +49 201 / 360 379 14
Fax:     +49 201 / 360 379 16
Web:     www.seonic.net
Email:   mbj@seonic.net
Twitter: twitter.com/_m_b_j_
OS-Code: github.com/mbj

Environment setup wise, running a Linux VM makes life a lot more 
enjoyable.

Project wise, I've done a lot of meandering this past year, hopefully 
some
of these will sound fun to you:
1. Pacman with Gosu Library
2. Bullet Hell Game with Gosu Library (which was largely a Box2D 
collision
project)
3. Reddit Crawler/Bot
4. IRC Client/Bot - Hooks into SVN and will post messages when 
regressions
are broken.
5. PunchCard/Hour Logging system with Sinatra
6. Static Website Generator

Thank you Ricky.  Pacman seems like a fun project.  It sounds like Gosu
allows me to work with just Ruby and a few gems.  It also allows me to
create an executable file once my program is complete. It is my
understanding in that case the user who runs the executable would not 
need
to have ruby or anything else in particular installed on their machine 
in
order to run.

Do I understand correctly?

Colby

Gosu in itself doesn't provide the executable packaging. Gosu is the 2D
game library.

In terms of packaging, you want to look here:
https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/packaging_...

There are a couple options if you want the final output to be a self
contained .exe. And yes, it's a pretty awesome experience when you have 
a
final product that you can run with a single executable =D


On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Colby Callahan

Releasy is the gem shown on the Gosu page for packaging an .exe from 
what I
saw.

I installed the gosu gem, copy pasted about 10 lines of code, ran it and
got a window with text!  It pretty rare that I can use example code and
actually have it work!  Thanks again.  :)

On 02/01/2013 08:15 AM, Colby Callahan wrote:
>
> p.s.  I have no idea how to deploy a rails application - environment
> seems impossible to set up - yes I have followed more than 5 tutorials
> exactly.  Prob doesn't help I'm on a Windows 64 bit machine as it
> seems certain dll files and other things get messed up easily.
>
> Colby

Maybe write some useful puppet modules?

Sam

Hello,

On 31 Ιαν 2013, at 20:15 , Colby Callahan <colby.callahan@gmail.com> 
wrote:

> I have started learning Ruby this past week and have down the basics of loops, 
filters, strings, arrays, hashes, functions, etc.
>
> Since I have no professional experience with the language, I figured I would 
complete a few projects on my own and see if I can get hired somewhere.
>
> What kinds of small projects might a beginning Ruby programmer take on that 
would demonstrate enough skill to get hired?  Is Ruby code enough or would it have 
to be an actual Rails app?
>
> p.s.  I have no idea how to deploy a rails application - environment seems 
impossible to set up - yes I have followed more than 5 tutorials exactly.  Prob 
doesn't help I'm on a Windows 64 bit machine as it seems certain dll files and 
other things get messed up easily.
>
> Colby


Mind you, I'm not an expert. Actually, I'm a newbe/amateur programmer 
and I've received 2 job offers just because I put some lines of code 
with sinatra and sqlite on github. Of course I didn't take the job 
because I'm *not* a programmer.

However, in my view apart from your own projects, it would "pay a lot" 
to get active and involved with current "hot projects" like octopress 
(instead building your own static website generator), nokogiri (ruby 
gem), ROR, spree (e-commerce solution) and so on. As for your own 
project, I'd do gladly something *I need* not something just for the 
sake of doing it.

best regards,

Panagiotis (atmosx) Atmatzidis

email:  atma@convalesco.org
URL:  http://www.convalesco.org
GnuPG ID: 0xE736C6A0
gpg --keyserver x-hkp://pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 0xE736C6A0

Thanks for the input Panagiotis.  When I figure out how to use Github, I
will definitely use it more.  The only problem with the theory of
"something useful" vs. "something for the sake of doing it" is that to 
do
useful things is incredibly difficult for someone who can't run the
simplest ROR example application after so many tutorials and walk 
through
videos which teach me nothing.

One thing about joining a project is that I have no idea what others are
doing.  Checked out Gnome, Mozilla, etc. and again after hours of 
reading
found nothing that would actually help me start doing something useful 
as a
beginner (yes I'm on the Gnome beginner list).  Coding has never been my
problem.  I can probably code in any language easy enough (logic is 
logic).
 It's integrating thousands of libraries, packages, dll's, plugins,
environment b.s., etc. with my code and deploying it that seems 
impossible
to me at this point.  If I ever found someone who could explain what is
necessary to deploy a ROR app - meaning no assumptions about 
requirements -
and it actually worked on my computer, I would probably just die of 
shock.
 (Lynda.com's walk through of rails doesn't work, the tutorials on the 
main
rails site doesn't work, etc.)  I recently followed Google's tutorial on
how to make a simple ruby script to create a file on Drive (literally
copy/paste .rb code, a couple gem installs).  Didn't work.  Tried for
almost 2 hours to figure it out then gave up.  Same old story time and 
time
again.  The only thing that does work is running standalone ruby file, 
or
the Gosu package mentioned earlier in thread.

Maybe after switching to Linux, some problems will go away.

Eternally Frustrated with Programming Education,

Colby


On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 3:18 PM, Panagiotis Atmatzidis

A good start is writing documentation or helping it become better. :)


-----
Carlos Agarie

Control engineering
Polytechnic School, University of São Paulo, Brazil
Computer engineering
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, USA


2013/1/31 Colby Callahan <colby.callahan@gmail.com>

Colby

Am also new in Ruby and i understand the frustration.

Two books i found amazing resources, since they make the assumption that 
you are indeed a newbie are:

Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas
Beginning Ruby From Novice to Professional by Peter Cooper

you may also wanna check this series of videos on youtube.

It is 30 hours step by step on deploying A RoR application. I don''t 
think you can find a better freebie out there

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSXDqiI4sC5M...

Hope that helps

theodore

On Fri, 1 Feb 2013, Colby Callahan wrote:

> p.s.  I have no idea how to deploy a rails application - environment seems
> impossible to set up - yes I have followed more than 5 tutorials exactly.
> Prob doesn't help I'm on a Windows 64 bit machine as it seems certain dll
> files and other things get messed up easily.

From my experience, most Ruby folks seem to use Linux or OSX, Windows is
definitely a second class citizen in the Ruby ecosystem.  So, if you can
go to running Linux (maybe Ubuntu in a virtual machine), you may be a 
lot
better off.

-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts.
It's what I can remember in time to use.

Thanks Matt.  I just installed virtual box, ubuntu 12.10 32 bit, is up 
and
running fine.  Was not able to get any "gem list" like I was in Windows,
but trying to see if RVM can fix it for me.  Installing right now so
fingers crossed.

Best of luck, Colby -- Ruby is the most fun programming language I've
used since Lisp. In addition to learning how to code in Ruby, you
should also be definitely looking at the whole ecosystem out there for
testing, writing, debugging, storing, and deploying applications, be
they gems, rails apps, sinatra apps, desktop apps, etc. I'm not at all
familiar with Windows-based development, so I can't really recommend
tools and such, except what might be available cross-platform. Getting
up on a GNU/Linux VM might be really helpful, I can't say for coming
from Windows. Something else is getting used to the *nix command line;
outside of my editing environemnt, and when I have to use the web for
things such as github, I practically *live* on the command line.

But most of all: Have Fun!

Everything worked!  RVM, ruby 1.9.3, gem, node.js, sqllite3, webrick up 
and
running.  When I generated a new app, ran server, and saw ruby on
localhost:3000 I was overcome with joy.  The virtual box by Oracle works
great.  Out of the box networking, bi directional clipboard/drag-drop, 
and
easy 3d acceleration to run Ubuntu 12.10 which now apparently only does 
the
3d unity package.

I created my first controller/action, figured out (to some degree) 
routing,
etc.  Can't wait to work on something now.

Tamouse, thanks.  Having fun finally...


On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 8:02 PM, tamouse mailing lists <