What are the stages a Rubyist progresses through from absolute beginner to "employable"?

Question

I am looking for a delineation of describable stages that an aspiring Ruby programmer will have to confront, explore, and master before being considered as a professional or employable.

Basically, I've been fiddling with Ruby since late 2006 and still feel lost. It's completely hobby at this point so I haven't dedicated myself to it but after all the time I've spent reading about it, installing and reinstalling libs, buying 10+ books--maybe the best way to put it is that I'm a fan and not yet a practitioner. But I feel like after all the time, money, mental gymnastics, and emotion, I should start to reap some type of benefit or see some ROI.

So, once again I re-read another excellent Ruby book and what's such a trip to me is that I understand all of the fundamentals but I can never put them together to make any lib of consequence.

I know data types, operators, control flows, OOP, classes, modules, keywords, etc. I don't know how to combine them all.

Can someone who's traveled this path explain their perspective on the different stages one must go through, i.e., "completely clueless, to "understanding the syntax", to "making a tiny application", to "making a lib worthy of becoming a gem", to "holy moley this girl's good!"

Answer 1

I think the best way to progress is to come up with a project that will interest you, and stretch you, that is expandable, so you can eventually have something more useful to others and complex. Then you will have learned how to do better design in Ruby, and more importantly you will learn more about the limits of Ruby.

Along the way you will have answered your own question.

Answer 2

Not necessarily in exact order...

• Learning the syntax
• Playing code-golf (Pick questions with > 10 upvotes. See also this and this.)
• Figuring out the object system
• Getting distracted by Smalltalk and Lisp as you realize where some of that stuff came from
• Implementing a pet project of reasonable size
• LEARNING RAILS
• Implementing two or three public sites for your friends and yourself, for your portfolio
• To understand a complex OO program, just pick a bigger challenge: use Treetop and write a language processor of some kind, or a paint program, or maybe an elaborate board game or adventure game, some kind of desktop application with complexity

Answer 3

Practice is the only way to do it.

Rails is a good starting point. But for the person with limited programming experience it may not be the best starting point. You may have trouble figuring out where Ruby ends and where Rails begins.

A better starting point would be tweaking an existing project. There is a metric buttload of gems that have open tickets. Pick one and submit a patch. Bug hunting through some one else's project will not take you from "understanding syntax" to "creating a lib that is worthy of being a gem", but, it get you close. Patching existing gems will provide insight into how a Ruby library is structured and fits together.

Don't expect to able to jump right into writing libraries. I believe the hardest part of creating that gem is settling on an idea that hasn't been done yet. The second hardest part is figuring out where to start. Again the only real way to learn that is through practice. Really getting to know existing libraries and following commit logs can give you examples of how others have built their libraries.

Once you feel comfortable with library design you can start practising the creation aspect of design. Ask yourself "How would I recreate this gem?" By answering you will develop your own process for attacking the problem, and hopefully produce your first gem. When your ready you can apply those skills to your own libraries.