Indeed.
“Somebody” is Alexandru (to whom I cannot express all of my thanks for
taking this up) and all of the relevant discussion is in this thread.
When there will be something running, I guess I’ll afford to hack on
it myself, too.
And Craig B. and Steven Quinones-Colon also volunteered to help,
also I haven’t heard from them yet.
What a great community!!!
Lately I’ve tried to learn a few languages and figured that Ruby was
so great and easy that it made my expectations rise to the point of
laziness. Well, today I understood that this refers not only to my
expectations from a language. It is true about communities too.
Thank you, Ruby users everywhere!
Aur S.
On Feb 19, 2007, at 5:25 AM, Mark W. wrote:
- Have some (progressively harder) newbie quizzes on RubyQuiz. ie
have a
series of quizzes that brings the (semi) newbie up to the level of the
quizzes that are there now.
James Edward G. II
Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I spent the last couple of days
sending my daughter off to a D.C. school trip. I have a server that I
can volunteer but the problem is that I’m a noob when it comes to
rails apps and such, so I wouln’t know what to do. But the physical
hardware is there for anyone that want to develop something on it.
On Feb 19, 2007, at 7:11 AM, SonOfLilit wrote:
http://rubymentor.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?AurSarafAndSamantha
This is an edited transcript of my discussions with Samantha this far.
One of the downsides of a two-person chat, as opposed to asking a
question here is that you don’t get as much input. I’m not saying
that makes the mentoring idea bad, but I do think it’s something we
want to keep in mind.
For example, in that transcript, Aur says:
“YAML is really like XML… You can, if you want, do whatever XML
thing you wanted but in YAML syntax…”
I know the Ruby community is very pro YAML and really down on XML,
but the fact remains that the have different purposes. XML is a
markup language. It is for marking up content. YAML is a data
description language. It’s primarily used for serializing data into
a human readable format. These are different purposes.
If you have trouble understanding the difference, try converting the
home page of your web site into a reasonable YAML format. It’s a
good exercise.
I would likely favor XML as a format for my résumé, though that point
is certainly debatable.
James Edward G. II
On 2/20/07, James Edward G. II [email protected] wrote:
If you have trouble understanding the difference, try converting the
home page of your web site into a reasonable YAML format. It’s a
good exercise.I would likely favor XML as a format for my résumé, though that point
is certainly debatable.James Edward G. II
I agree. But I think even when one is lead in the wrong direction
because of a mistake by the mentor, that direction might be a better
one than what he would get on the list.
I made a mistake there, but I gave her a template to think in, a way
to transition her thoughts from something she is familiar with. She
would have eventually found out exactly how wrong I was, but still it
would have taken her forward.
And when I opened our discussion, it was so that I would get such
feedback. I thought that I might have mistakes and although the
discussion itself is better in a group <= 4, it’d be great if someone
would later correct them 
So thanks
Aur
On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 06:14:23AM +0900, Ruben M. wrote:
And, to avoid quoting all way back -I’m too lazy to do that-, I’ll just
say I find great the idea of small “study groups”. Of course, the term
may seem scary for all of us who hate school, but enjoy programming,
but the idea is to make it on a enjoyable, relaxed and productive way.Should we let the newbies do it? Of course, that’s the best way to
learn.
An infrastructure for prompting the “study group” approach for Ruby
newbies would be (relatively) easy to set up. All you’d really need is
a very simple bloglike and mailing list interface. With the blog
someone starting a group can create a blog for posting something akin
to “progress reports” and otherwise archiving what’s going on for
reference, including some “this is the task we should attempt to
complete by the end of this week” scheduling stuff. There’d be one of
these for each study group, that lasts only as long as the group does,
so the software need not be very complex. For the mailing list, there’d
be a mailing list created at the same time, with the list archives
attached to the blog, so that anyone registered with one of them is also
registered with the other, and can post to both.
Archives for both should probably be kept in perpetuity so that they can
serve as examples of how various study concepts work out, and so that
people too shy about their Ruby learning can use the example of study
groups to provide some structure to their own autodidactism* rather than
leaving them flailing about trying to sort out which online resources to
use, what constitutes a reasonable learning schedule, and so on.
I’d set up something like that myself for the Ruby community – could
probably get it put together in about two days, with some web software
packages that are available so that little or no actual programming
would be required to set them up initially (thus speeding up the
process, though of course ultimately it should be written in Ruby for
maximum relevance to the community) – but since I’m already putting
together something more centralized and less Ruby-specific, I’m afraid
my attention is directed elsewhere at the moment.
Wow, that was a long sentence.
Hi guys, long time lurker, first time poster.
As a Ruby newbie I’d like to give a big thumbs up to the “study group”
idea, especially if a group of newbies got together to actually work
on some sort of project. Personally, while 1:1 attention can be great,
I find working in a group to be one of the best learning methods
around. Mix a group into a real-world project and I’m willing to bet
you’re going to have a lot of newbies (including myself) hooked.
I think this idea would be especially beneficial to people like myself
who are interested in starting to contribute to existing open source
projects, but find themselves slightly overwhelmed, and unsure as to
where to start. I know that I’ve been looking for some kind of project
that I can start contributing to, not only to help make some
contributions to the community, but also to learn more about
developing code in such a large, distributed environment.
Just my $0.02
- Matt
On 2/19/07, James Edward G. II [email protected] wrote:
I would likely favor XML as a format for my résumé, though that point
is certainly debatable.James Edward G. II
I agree, with a need for input that goes beyond the scope of a 1-on-1
chat.
I think that it’s a situational basis; there will be times when I’m
going to
come to the list, times I’ll go to someone off-list.
For example, I have been debating whether or not to post this here, or
on
the Ruby on Rails forum, because I’m not quite sure that this fits into
the
scope of just regular Ruby, although I’m sure it could. It’s more of a
database-thinking type of a deal… I consider this more of my home than
I
do the Ruby on Rails forum, having only posted there a time or two.
I’m working with a few concepts that would be dealing with databases.
(As
seen in the convo between Aur and I.) I’m really struggling with
wrapping
my head around databases. “What information should go into which
table,”
type of stuff. That has led me to search on concepts dealing with
databases… I was going to ask if anyone could point me in the
direction of
some good newbie database conceptual type material. I’ve got a couple
of
documents that deal with PHP and MySql, and some of them talk about
database
programming and application development. While I know that I don’t have
to
be the MySQLMaster, (or MySQLMistress, as the case would be), I think
that
if I’m going to be tinkering with databases, I need to have an
understanding
of them.
That request for a point in the right direction isn’t exactly Ruby
related,
isn’t exactly RoR related, but more database related. Being that I feel
comfy here, I’m probably not going to go over to a MySQL forum and ask
for
resources (although it would probably help), because a) I’m here, and b)
the
Ruby community would probably be more likely to point me in the right
direction for MySQL resources that may relate more to Ruby.
In any case, as usual, I am rambling. It’s been a long day and I’ve
been
reading and studying for the past 8 hours. My brain hurts.
–
Samantha
“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hi guys, long time lurker, first time poster.
As a Ruby newbie I’d like to give a big thumbs up to the “study group”
idea, especially if a group of newbies got together to actually work
on some sort of project. Personally, while 1:1 attention can be great,
I find working in a group to be one of the best learning methods
around. Mix a group into a real-world project and I’m willing to bet
you’re going to have a lot of newbies (including myself) hooked.
I think this idea would be especially beneficial to people like myself
who are interested in starting to contribute to existing open source
projects, but find themselves slightly overwhelmed, and unsure as to
where to start. I know that I’ve been looking for some kind of project
that I can start contributing to, not only to help make some
contributions to the community, but also to learn more about
developing code in such a large, distributed environment.
Just my $0.02
- Matt