Ruby Rogues

This episode is a My Ruby Story with Simon Moro. Simon is an Australian record producer and mixer. He has been teaching himself Ruby for the last 18 months, Rails framework, and is a frustrated aspiring entrepreneur. Through negative experiences with outsourcing and finding tech co-founders, he wanted to empower and educate himself.

How did you get into programming?

He remembers that the first computer in his home was actually called a dinosaur. His first experience with a computer made him intrigued. He was a lot of gaming consoles when he was young. Personally liked Sega and his best friend liked Nintendo. It was like an early Apple vs. Android rivalry.

He was introduced to visual basic in an InfoTech class in high school. His high school didn’t have a strong tech department so it was a very simple class. There was a button that you would click which would display a dialogue box with a calculator. He was fascinated by the way you could write instructions. He had always been full of ideas. The idea that you could create a digital product just by writing text fascinated him. He started borrowing books from the library and even bought a few. He tried to teach himself.

When he got older he used HTML and found WordPress useful as a music programmer and for the digital products he created. It wasn’t until 18 months ago that he thought he would try to learn a language and build something.

Connection Between Music and Programming

There are a lot of programmers that are also musicians. People don’t often acknowledge that there is creativity in code. Music and code may be appealing to people for the same reasons: because there is both science and creativity in both areas. Music is about agreements within a culture. Musicians agree that certain notes blended with each other either do or do not work. This is how they program symphonies and refactor sheet music to make it easier to read. Music is a process of solving problems creatively using a structure where if you go outside of that structure it won’t work. This is similar to front-end frameworks. In musical theory a lot of things are mathematical. There is a science of music and what makes it sound good. This is foundational in the same way math is the foundation in computer science.

Did you start programming in WordPress or did your interest in programming come from something else?

Simon did little in WordPress in terms of learning to program. He delved into CSS and changed themes using Envarto. He outsourced those tweaks to people from freelancing websites. He did try to learn PHP for his wife’s product but realized he didn’t do it correctly.

He was involved in Melbourne startup world and heard about Ruby on Rails through that. He researched it after he heard about it and read about the philosophy behind it. He raised capital to build a product production management tool for music producers. He built it in Ruby on Rails, and a company in Deli built that for him. He had to fire them and start again.

Because he’d been exposed to it, decided he’d delve into it and teach himself because if he’d started his learning at the same time he’d hired the company he could have taken over once he fired that company. He tells people that they can teach themselves if they have time and has people they can ask for help if they get stuck.

Are you building the mbp for your own product?

Simon built it himself. He had found a tech co-founder 18 months ago but it went south. Five weeks ago he finally decided to do it himself. He focused on one particular feature for receiving client feedback on a work in progress for music. A band that’s sending demos to each other can upload a song and add comments of change requests within the site.

How did you come to Ruby? What was it about Ruby and how did you find it that made you decide to want to do this type of work in Ruby as opposed to PHP or something else?

Simon started reading the philosophy around Ruby; then looked at the code. He thought the Ruby language and the Rails code made sense compared to PHP. He believed that PHP had too much code. He also likes the elegance of Ruby and the Rails framework, the organization, and the syntax.

What kinds of things have you done with Ruby? Is this your first and only product/project? Have you done other things? Ways to learn?

He believes that the way he is learning is most useful to beginners. The first thing that he did is to jump into a Ruby on Rails course through Treehouse. He found it confusing but he completed the course. A friend told him he thought it’d be helpful to learn Ruby through lynda.com. After that, he could separate Rails and Ruby. He started making quick prototypes to help learn and putting together budgets for projects apps, which he used for himself.

Do you find that the courses were enough or did you have to find groups of people who were coding or find a mentor?

It has helped by having people he could reach out to. He hasn’t had formal meetings with mentors. He had a problem with Track Bits and his friend Rahj helped find a solution to a problem one day. He has had moments where he’s been stuck like that and had someone help him. It is difficult to know what questions to ask Google to get the answers. Having someone to point the things out he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know is helpful.

What was it that made you get to the point that you said, “I’m pretty comfortable with this, and I think I can do a good job with it.”

He graduated from audio production in 2000. He has generally been the opposite of confident. He always assumes that he can always learn more, when he started out he was more confident than he is now in his craft. He now knows how important his role is in his client’s potential for connecting with an audience and his client’s potential for going further in their career. When he was younger he thought he could do things because he was trained so he could do things.

Picks

Simon:

Charles:

Links:

• First phase – building computers in the first place but it was hard coded onto the physical computing machinery
• Second phase – programmable computers. Where you can reprogram your computer to do anything. This is the phase where programmers fall.
• Third phase – machine learning falls under this phase.

• Machine Learning Guide Podcast: http://ocdevel.com/podcasts/machine-learning
• The Master Algorithm. https://www.amazon.com/Master-Algorithm-Ultimate-Learning-Machine/dp/0465065708
• Andrew Ng course: coursera.org/machine/learning

• 20-gallon Husky oil free air compressor: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-20-Gal-Vertical-Oil-Free-Electric-Air-Compressor-0332013/207040335

• Twitter T gem: https://rubygems.org/gems/t/versions/2.10.0>
• Ruby Dev Summit: www.rubydevsummit.com
• Rake: https://www.sitepoint.com/rake-automate-things/

• Machine Learning Guide Podcast: http://ocdevel.com/podcasts/machine-learning
• Philosophy of Mind: Brains, Consciousness, and Thinking Machines (The Great Courses): https://www.amazon.com/Great-Courses-Philosophy-Mind/dp/1598034243

This episode of My Ruby Story features Greg Baugues. Greg has been on two previous episodes, episode 142 where he discussed mental illness, and episode 258 where he discussed Twilio. Greg has been at Twilio for three and a half years. He worked on the developer/evangelism team for three years. A couple of months ago he became the lead developer of the community team. He lived in Chicago for eleven years, where he first started using Ruby. He moved to Brooklyn, New York a year ago.

How did you get into programming?

When he was five or six his parents owned a TRS-80 when he was five or six. It had a cassette drive and when turned on it booted into basic. He wrote programs in basic on this computer and it was an instant gratification to him. On a back cover of a magazine, he read there would be a code printed in basic that he would copy line by line. Later, his family bought a PC that had MS-DOS with QBasic, and his friends introduced him to Pascal, C, and C++. When he graduated high school he started PHP and got into web stuff.

How did you get from PHP and web stuff to Ruby?

In 1999 Greg used PHP to start a dot-com company with which they sold eight months later for all equity. He jokes that he “started and sold a company and all I got was a polo shirt out of it.”  This reinforced that he always wanted to work in programming but that he would never be happy just programming. He wanted to be involved working on the people side of things, too. He got a job at a consulting agency at Table XI where he was a sales guy. He claims that he wasn’t good at sales, so stopped programming for one and a half to two years in order to become better. Then he traveled with his wife in Europe for a while. This showed him that he spent his free time programming. After this he picked up Ruby for the first time. Ruby was his first language of choice because Table XI and most of Chicago was using Ruby at the time. He also fell in love with it.

What was it about Ruby that you thought was cool?

Greg finds Ruby beautiful and expressive. He believes that it makes more sense than for loop and believes that you can explain it to someone who’s never done coding before and it makes sense to them. Writing Ruby is the closest you can come to writing pseudo code that actually runs. Ruby doesn’t look much different from pseudo code. He thinks it is a joy to write in Ruby.

What contributions do you feel like you’ve made to the Ruby community?

Greg believes that his biggest contribution would be in the vein of mental health. He has Bipolar Disorder and was on a Ruby Rogues podcast where he spoke about it. Because of his disorder, he failed out of college, had trouble with relationships, getting out of bed, paying bills, and a lot of guilt. He finally got treatment in 2007 where medication slowly helped. Four years ago he had a coworker who overdosed that had been showing symptoms of the same disorder. The next day instead of doing a lightening talk he had scheduled about fantasy football, he gave a talk about mental illness and started giving talks about mental illnesses everywhere in the Ruby community.

Charles tells Greg that he heard someone speak about him and said he’d decided to go get help and have a relationship with his family again. He said that Greg’s episode of the podcast had helped him, and others have emailed him about it too. He explains that changing the way someone lives is just as important as writing source code. Greg says that he has learned that we are not alone in this community. There is a value of sharing your story and being vulnerable. It is easy to underestimate the compassion and empathy people have in the Ruby community.

What are you working on now?

Greg just had a conference called Signal for Twilio two weeks ago. There were 2,000 developers and 100 speakers at the conference. He was part of the team that organized speakers. Two months ago he started a leadership role with the developer community team for the first time. He’s trying to learn how to be in a management role for the first time. There were a million developers that signed up for Twilio so he is trying to figure out how to organize a community of developers instead of just having customers.

Picks

Greg:

Charles:

Links:

• Don’t Know Metaprogramming in Ruby? By Gavin Morrice

• Sherlock TV Series on BBC

• iOS application: Workflow
• Overwatch

• Ruby Dev Summit
• Angular Dev Summit
• Focuster

• Petergate
• Comprehensive Ruby Programming by Jordan Hudgens
• Twitter @jordanhudgens
• Instagram @jordanhudgens
• Blog crondose.com

On this episode Charles talks to Ruby Rouges panelist Dave Kimura, the creator of Drifting Ruby, the popular Ruby on Rails Screencast and Blog. Find out more about how Dave got interested in programming and first introduced to the world of Ruby. Dave also talks about how and when he started Drifting Ruby.

Dave discusses living in Germany during middle school in the 90s. During this time, he owned a simple Mac LC II. He found a floppy disc that contained a program called Chipmunk Basic, which was his very first exposure into the world of programming. His interest with programming was further sparked by computers at school. These computers were loaded with three different programs: Fortran, Pascal, and C compiler. All of these peaked his interest in programming further.  


Dave tells Charles that anything that pre-dates the Internet feels like a different world; one in which learning was more complicated. He talks about how technology has come a long way in the past 20 years. He discusses the creativity that people have displayed and how amazed he is by the progression of different applications.

Dave discusses his work as a Systems Administrator at an engineering firm for the past 6 years after college. He talks about being at his current job at Sage Software for almost 8 years and that he does not believe in job hopping, although many do today. He states that he has no valid reasoning that he went with Ruby over Python or another program. He says that he did not like PHP or asp.net. Instead he wanted something new. Dave wanted to do things the way he wanted to do, which can’t be done in Python. A big part of his decision was made when he looked at Matz’s twitter. Matz seemed happy which led Dave to pick Ruby, which he thinks is mainly a good “dumb luck” decision.

Dave says that the coolest thing he’s done is with a Raspberry Pi his brother gifted him in 2013–2014 for Christmas. He built a CNC machine and a Ruby Gem called a Router out of it. He explains that he wrote an interpreter to read and control the machine. He adds that he has built a bunch of hardware as well.

Dave says that his inspiration is Ryan Bates, who created RailsCast and went off the grid in 2013. He strives to fill in the high bar that Ryan left by producing quality material.

Dave started Drifting Ruby in 2015, which is a couple years after RailsCast. He explains that he was not entirely committed to the program at first. He explains that he has revamped the audio setup two or three times.

Dave is currently focused on releasing good content. He wants to give back to the Ruby community and feels good that people are able to use the content he produces. Eventually he states that it will go to a subscription base, but does not have a definite date as to when. He is very dedicated to his work, as he spends 10 to 15 hours of his weekend working on episodes.

Dave feels like his commitment to Ruby Rogues has been consistent but is not a hassle. He doesn’t look at it as something he wants to get paid for because he enjoys the time he dedicates weekly. He doesn’t feel like he’s had anything big other than Drifting Ruby.

Dave is currently working on a money manager that he uses with his wife. He built this Ruby on Rails application in 2011–2012 off of the premise he learned at a Dave Ramsey conference. He states that he recently rewrote it and cleaned up so that it uses the latest Rails 5.1.1. The application helps budget money for bills, groceries, spending money, etc. using a digital envelope system. He states that anyone is able to use the program, and it has made a difference in his life.

Harbor Freight

Ketogenic diet Spaghetti Squash

Dave’s Twitter

On this episode we have another My Ruby Story and there is a good chance you might recognize him, he is one of Devchat.tv’s panelists Brian Hogan. Aside from being a panelists on Ruby Rouges, he also has a couple other projects like codecaster.io as well as Railsmentors.org.

Brain talks about how his Dad has an old Apple 2 computer. His father was a teacher for the blind and the computer had a box on it that would talk. His Dad taught him that computers can have programs written for them and make them do things. Brain talks about having math issues one evening and his Dad helped by making a math program that would quiz him. His Dad wasn’t a programmer but he had picked up some of it from being around it. Brain talks about how the library had games you could get for the Apple 2 but you had to write code into the computer to make it work. He started tweaking the code to learn that it adjusted things in the game like the speed of the spaceship or the damage of the bomb.

Brian’s first program was in fourth grade. He had an assignment on the topic of the seas and instead of doing a typical handwritten assignment he created a program for it. He learned that he could make the computer do things. Over time Brian got interested in other things, planning to go to school for law. His Dad lost his job making his plans for law school unreachable without student loan debt. He started making money on the side repairing and building computers.

He talks about how he never really got into the computer science level of things, but he was always excited about being able to solve people’s problems with computers. He remembers getting internet for the first time. It was Netscape and it came with a book on how to setup the internet and then in the last chapter it had a section teaching how to make a webpage with HTML. He loved making websites and so he made pages for businesses and made money on the side. He went to college aiming for computer science and then when he got into classes like computational theory, he found that it was boring to him still. He changed his major to business. He then got a job working for the college working with website stuff. The developer for the pages ended up quitting and so they asked Brian to help out. So he learned Microsoft server SQL and ASP. He adds that essentially he fell into web development by accident. He talks about his code being bad until he learned Ruby, crediting Ruby with making object oriented programming easier to understand. Charles mentions that he felt the same way in school, it wasn’t until he needed to fix a real problem that programming really started to seem useful and fun. Brian talks about how he isn’t really the best programmer, but his strengths are helping other people to program. He has trained many people to program since then.

He talks about in school how they throw JavaScript at you and teach you the higher concepts before understanding it. He tells about how doing something like teaching Git on the first day doesn’t make sense because the students don’t understand why they need it. He suggests that the thing that is missing from the curriculum is the real work connection. Majority of adults need to be able to connect what they are learning to something they have already learned. Context is important for learning.

Brian talks about doing PHP for a while as well as ASP. He was working with a project as an Oracle DBA. They were moving from Java to an Oracle Database. But no one there knew what Java was and a person there named Bruce suggested that the work they were doing would be better written in Ruby. The team disagreed but afterward one day Brian was talking to Bruce about a side project he was working on and how he wasn’t accomplishing it the way he wanted to. Bruce asked him to get lunch with him. Brian then talks about how in life if someone very smart asks you to get lunch that you should drop everything and do it. In a single night he was able to accomplish everything he was trying to. He took his project to work the next day and they said they wouldn’t be able to use it on Windows. Brian started working on finding ways to deploy it, and that has been the starting point of Ruby for Brian. He went to Rails full time after that. Publishing an article on how to get it deployed. His work with Ruby led to him teaching and writing books. When he needs to make something heavily data driven he always reaches for Ruby. He isn’t interested in scalability because usually he is working on a small business process behind the firewall used by less than 100 people.

Brian talks about the fear and pressure to use the latest and greatest frameworks in the development community. He talks about how the only people who know what framework a person uses is the developer and the peers. You don’t get paid to impress peers in the community. A developer gets paid to solve peoples problems. Charles and Brian add that using new frameworks are great and can teach you new ways to solve problems, but no matter how a person solves a problem, it should be celebrated. Learn new things but don’t make people feel bad for not doing things the same way you do them. Brian adds that another reason he likes Rails is that it has a lot of things that came from basecamp and it is a well developed and tested and the framework is strong. He talks about how sometimes frameworks come out and they weren’t well thought out. Rails is not an academic framework but it is easier to integrate or upgrade to by design.

Brian talks about getting the Rails deploy working for Windows is one of his proudest moments. Other than that his contribution has been mainly helping people find mentors at Railsmentors.org. On Railsmentors.org, most of the work is done by volunteers and help a lot of people. Charles adds that sometimes open source project contributions tend to get glorified but things like Railsmentors.org are really what make the community great.

Brian talks about how he is working on a book but he can’t tell much about it at the moment. He also works on the content team on Digital Ocean. He helps other community authors with their writing and to get it published and out. He also handles some system admin background to test that each article works and he finds it a good way to keep his skills tuned. He is also working on a project in Elixir for teachers to work in the classroom better. For a teacher teaching development they can use the program, CodeCaster, to display code to the screens and the students can do things like flag things they don’t understand or let the teacher know that it’s moving too fast. It allows the students send up code for the teacher to check as well as the teacher get a snapshot of what’s on the students screen to check on them.

Exercises for Programmers

Coursera on AI

Twitter

• Gruvbox

• Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilbers
• Rails

• Rails 5.1 Loves Javascript (Medium article)
• Hackerrank

• Castle Clash
• railsmentors.org

• Grammarly
• History of Pi by Petr Beckmann
• Sierra Nevada’s West Coast Stout
• Github @marklocklear
• Site locklear.me

In this episode it’s another My Ruby Story and this week’s story is Jordan Hudgens’. Jordan is lead instructor of Bottega, a code school based in Lehi, Utah but also located in Phoenix and Salt Lake City. You’ll hear a bit about how Decamp.com came to be as well as what makes it stand out from the rest. You’ll also catch a couple tangents including one on artificial intelligence, augmented reality, an IoT. Don’t miss this one!

Jordan talks about how at the age of 12 his father had a business and with their budget couldn’t afford a web designer. His father offers Jordan to buy him a computer if he can build the website. He muddles his way through HTML documentation to create his first, and particularly ugly website 20 years ago. When he turned 16, he started working on better applications as well as learned PHP.

As Jordan got further and further, he worked a lot in the energy sector, including Chevron and Oxy. This sort of work became dull and boring for him. He knew that there were other things out there that would be better. He started learning Ruby and fell in love with it. He mentions that working with Ruby helped him to love coming into work. Jordan now works almost exclusively in Ruby on Rails now.

Jordan talks about switching all of his work over to Ruby, including doing work for Quip, the toothbrush service. He has also done work for EventBrite on one of their Micro Services. He soon after quit his work to start devcamp.com and launch his own learning platform. He says that he learns best by teaching so he started to create courses, usually for himself. He self-published on platforms like Udemy, but was also hired to create courses for FlatIron School in New York. His time was spent less in development and more in creating courses.

As a developer and having his own consulting shop, he recognized that camps weren’t teaching certain things like algorithms and even soft skills like project management and estimation. He also wanted to include other things like machine learning. Jordan felt strong on what he felt a true job centric curriculum should be focused on. Uniquely, Jordan has created a strong network to hiring partners. Instead of just building a course, they build outlines for a certain topic and then has the hiring partners and network to help create a profile for the best candidate for hire. Then creating the workshop around those requests. A major element that makes Jordan’s Devcamp.com stand out is that they are one of the only accredited bootcamps out there. Devcamp also uniquely has a 2 year pathway mapped out similar to a university computer science curriculum. Universities have partnered with devcamp.com because the curriculum lose a little bit faster than the traditional taught curriculum. Students are getting hired a bit faster because they are learning more relevant information. Jordan states that the student’s success is also Devcamp.com’s success.

What makes a great developer is problem solving. Problem solving is the most important. If a person can dissect a challenge and come up with a plan, it’s very valuable. There is a problem solving course that presents a number of challenges where students learn to problem solve, not even using code. Taking a practical approach to give a sense a real world relevance and a mental framework for problem solving.

Jordan mentions that he tries to contribute to open source and that he has made a few Ruby Gems but his time is limited. He discovered that even when he was making good money developing, he didn’t feel like he was making a huge difference in the world. He talks about watching students who came from working minimum wage jobs leave the camp they started working very hard and making 50 to 60 grand a year. The camp changed their lives. Charles talks about how he relates with the podcast. People have come to him with similar stories of having enough confidence to change their careers after listening to the podcasts.

Jordan talks about how most of his time is developing new ‘Products’ for Devcamp. Each day he tries to add a few new features. One of the big plans is to start including machine learning into the curriculum. He talks about how when he adds features, he tries to use those features to teach and to create a relevant real world example. He finds that most students don’t like abstract thought patterns.

Jordan lets us know that yes some of the machine learning stuff he is working on is with Ruby. Interestingly enough, he spent time at the Rails Conf and went to every machine learning talk there. Every single machine learning talk was on Python. He mentions that “H.H’s” (David Heinemeier Hansson) keynote talk was on using the right tools. It’s hard to compete with the large number of libraries that Python has on machine learning.

Charles suggests that artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and Iot are really where technology is heading. Jordan and Charles talk about how they all three interplay together to enhance our lives. adjunctSensors from an Iot device uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to make decisions that then tie into how we experience reality. Charles mentions that he often tries to convince people that their phones are already supplementing our lives in a way that makes it augmented reality. Machine learning seems to be the glue that holds it all together.

Devcamp

Ruby Dev Summit

Bottega