Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Fastest Way to Learn Ruby

  Hello, everyone!

  I have been spending a lot of time coding these last couple of days, so I am pretty happy about that.

  Last Saturday, I drove up to Washington DC for a Ruby Meetup group, that meets every other Saturday for "what they call" a hack-a-thon. It was my first time participating in a meetup group, so I was not sure what to expect. I had a very positive experience. This particular meetup was basically an open lab session. Everyone came with their laptops and worked on their projects for 4 hours or so. It was great for a lot of reasons. I was there for 4 hours, so for 4 hours I pretty much was writing code. It is difficult to do that at home, because there are always distractions, and it is almost impossible to find a 4 hour block of time to just sit down and code. It was also great, because when I was stuck, there were several people who were very knowledgeable at Ruby sitting next to me, willing to dig into my code and help me out with it. I was working on my game for Chapter 45, and the host of the meetup spent about two hours with me, going though my code, giving me ideas, showing me how I can optimize my code, explaining a lot of new concepts to me on the way. I also asked questions about the previous chapter on hashes that I had difficulty with, and he explained some parts of the code that I had trouble with.

  I can honestly say that in two hours with him, I learned more than I do in a week of self-studying! It was incredible. I picked up a lot of little tips on how to work with irb, understood some important concepts that I was struggling with, etc. It was definitely worth the drive to DC, and I am looking forward to going there again, and going to other Ruby meetup groups in the area.

  If you are out there, trying to teach yourself code, look up local meetups that you can go to in your area. It might accelerate your learning and you might meet some interesting people.

  It is starting to slow down at work for me, as winter is approaching, so my plan is to double my study hours by November 1.

  I can't wait to finish Zed Shaw's book, and see what I can dive into next!

  The goal is to have Chapter 45 complete by this weekend!

  Thanks for reading, and til next time.

 -Andrei

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