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Showing posts from March, 2014

Context, Tooling and the Beginner Programmer

Renée De Voursney talking at the AU Ruby Conf about the trials and tribulations of learning Ruby. Renée De Voursney - Teaching Ruby for fun and profit from Ruby Australia on Vimeo . She talks about context and how there are so many disparate moving parts to get to grips with before one can "become" part of the Ruby community. Gaining a basic understanding of all the moving parts that encompass not only the Ruby language itself, but the social norms of RSpec, Git, Gems, Github, RVM, *nix, Macs, TDD and various command line tools, is too much of a hurdle for many people to jump. The biggest problem with a complete novice trying to get into programming is always some sort of feedback loop that will give them the justification to carry on. I'm a great believer in learning by debugging, but at the same time, giving the novice quick wins is important. Get them up and running quickly from nothing (and I mean nothing - no tools installed on their machine yet) to "he