Kevin W. Gisi

My last post sparked a lot of heated discussion from Ruby and non-Ruby developers alike. I want to stress that I personally love Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, and even Bundler (a little). My entire career has actually been based on the kind and voluntary actions of the Ruby community, and far from condemning it, I want to see that continue.

A few of the comments both here and on Hacker News pointed out that I didn’t really discuss any solutions to the problem. To be completely honest, I was hoping to hear what you all thought. For my part, I think there are a few key things that we can improve on:

• Increase one-on-one training (RailsMentors, Ruby user groups)
  Many of the comments on the last article were of a particular theme: “Rails is easy, just follow this tutorial.” And yet, each person threw out a different one. For a seasoned Ruby developer, navigating through the outdated blog posts, deprecated GitHub projects, to get to the stuff with real value is easy. Even if you don’t sign up as a Rails Mentor, try to help guide new developers toward a tutorial that’s up-to-date and easy to follow.

• Support what’s stable
  Gem authors, I’m looking at you! If you want to support Rails 3, fantastic. But make it easy to continue using your stuff on the current version of Rails.

• Documentation, documentation, documentation
  Don’t assume requisite knowledge for your projects - if your library is going gangbustas…how about a nice, pretty, how-to-use-the-gangbusta-going-gem-from-scratch tutorial? Please?

To try and do my part, I’ve recorded a screencast on how to get involved with the Ruby community. If you’re just getting started, give it a whirl!

Introduction to the Ruby Community from Kevin W. Gisi on Vimeo.