Thoughts on Pragmatic Studios’ Ruby Studio

I snapped a few pictures with my little digital camera just to get at least some kind of visual record. Certainly nothing like the last studio I was at where James Duncan Davidson was taking pictures like this.

Last week I was able to attend the Ruby Studio in Denver put on by guys at The Pragmatic Studio. It was a great experience and I highly recommend it to anyone who is serious about learning Ruby for professional or personal use. Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler both did a great job of instructing and connecting with their audience.

Here are few of my thoughts/suggestions for anyone who is considering attending:

1. Sit close to the front and engage with the instructors. You (or someone who cares about you) will be investing alot of time and money so you can be there; make the most of it. Dave and Chad were great about answering questions and seemed to enjoy the audience interaction. Just don’t ask questions to pontificate or try to impress Dave or Chad (or the rest of the group); chances are they won’t be.

2. Listen to Nicole Clark (The event coordinator/boss) when she suggests that you turn off your internet connection during the day (they provide wireless access). On the first day I was probably as much a culprit as the next person about checking email, etc. By the second day I was able to stay off (except for a few quick checks during breaks) and enjoyed completely focusing on the programming tasks at hand.

3. Bring a Mac and use TextMate. I felt bad at times for those in the audience without the Mac/TextMate combo because that is what both Dave and Chad were using from the front. The code->test->code cycle went very fast at times and, although the integration is really cool between OSX, Ruby, Textmate and Terminal, for those without that setup it must have been frustrating to watch and not emulate. One of the reasons I think I was able to keep up is that I had the same software/workflow setup that was being demonstrated. If you’re using some other setup, come prepared and already knowing the workflow of how to write, run and test simple ruby programs in your environment— it’ll pay off. (A personal confession: Attending the Rails Studio in Jan ‘06 with my Dell laptop and watching Dave and Mike demo code with TextTate on the Mac and seeing so many guys around me working with on MacBook Pros was the last little nudge that pushed me into finally moving back to Macs after many years of Windows use. I’ve never looked back.)

4. Make the effort to meet other people there. I found that it was a tough balance at times between wanting to really focus on learning and the benefit of getting to know fellow attendees. While lunches are a great time to spend time getting to know fellow attendees, I think they could have structured a few networking/social opportunities for one or more of the evenings; that would have helped break the ice even more. The alumni-only mailing list/yahoo group is a great place to foster and continue relationships after the event.

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Learning to program like a Ruby programmer--learning the idioms of Ruby

The soul of Ruby is in Japan. A different philosophy of programming. Wabi-sabi (sp?)

Use MacPorts for macs on ruby

Ruby is wonderfully self-contained (install in self-contained paths)

Updating gems doesn't overwrite older versions of gems

# Update gem itself
sudo gem update --system

Add a -y flag to gem install to default to yes to install dependencies

gem dependency rails

Consider using gems for internal projects as well.

6. Buy, read and bring Dave’s Programming Ruby (Pickaxe) book with you. You will will be glad you did. Not only will you have a better understanding of the material (and can better appreciate the personal observations and nuances from Dave and Chad), but you’ll also find some eerie similarities between the examples in the book and the ones used in class. (Ask Dave to autograph your book; I think he secretly gets a kick out of it; I know I would.)

7. Know what you want to get out of the three days and have a plan. I came with a specific goal in mind of getting over a hump in my Ruby programming. I’m happy to report that my time at Ruby Studio did exactly what I had hoped it would. I’m now much more able to get down to writing and implementing ideas with Ruby; instead of having to stop and look up syntax, examples and patterns every few seconds. It was very gratifying to dig into the guts of the Capistrano gem when I got home after the Studio and really understand what was going on with the code (One of Chad’s suggestions for followup work was to download some popular gems and look through the Ruby code).

Let’s face it, this kind of focused and expert training doesn’t come cheap (If you’re not local to the training location you’re looking at spending on the north side of $2,000 between tuition, travel and lodging). I feel grateful to have the resources to be able to attend and I’ve been very happy with my two experiences so far with Pragmatic Studios.

It’s not easy to put on an excellent multi-day training seminar and these guys do a very good job of it. I believe you’ll come away confident and inspired to go out and create great applications using Ruby.

The next Ruby Studio is slated for this summer.

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