406 karma · joined June 2, 2010
Imagine posting that requirement about writing beautiful code on a dating site-- how very few bachelors would even know what means
I'm ok with that. Small projects get done. Not everyone needs a $125/hr consultant. Some of those projects will grow and need more experienced developers. All of those beginner developers will gain experience. Some of those beginner developers will continue to grow, learn testing, learn better software design principles and start contributing to the community.
If Ruby on Rails has, or were to have, a small army of beginner developers writing poor code on small projects and charging too little for it; I think it would be a healthy thing.
Disclosure: I got started as a Rails-first-language developer and have loved every second of it. And I try to get new people started with web-development using Rails and hope to see them get their first small projects that they can write bad code for and get paid anything for.
I did the same thing in the fall of 2008, except that I taught myself to program _after_ quitting my job. I went into freelance consulting with Ruby on Rails and have been doing that ever since.
For tips: there's a lot of power in has_many :through. Watch the relevant Railscasts on has_many through and the Rails docs.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-ha...
has_many :through handles the minority of complex data relationships, but it gets used a lot and is a great starting place and can probably be helpful immediately in your projects/tasks/comments app
Ukrainian peasants were deported and killed for having more property that their neighbor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization 14.5 million dead
Central and Eastern European Jews first had their privacy violated before their jobs taken, moved to ghettos then to concentration camps. Imagine having a German last name but a Jewish grandmother, privacy matters. Or imagine if Germany did not have a handgun registry-- then its harder to confiscate guns from Jews, which makes its much more dangerous to herd them into camps.
Privacy loss ends in dead bodies-- but only after its too late to regain.
More people getting into farming could really help turn around American food
In the seomoz article find "It's even more terrifying, but they sent fake emails" to get to the relevant part.
I got this process from another Ruby consultant and it works great - Get wireframes of main page views (usually there are about 6 of these. You can help them create this - Get them to write out, or describe the requirements and take notes - Break the wireframes and requirements into user stories and load it into pivotal tracker with estimates - Tell them "we are going to build all these user stories PLUS 30 'freebie' points of stores. Any changes you want you can spend your freebie points on, and after that you can substitute out currently scheduled points if you really want those changes
It works great so far.
Having a real product to build, even if its just to help yourself and not the world is key. It gets you out of the tutorials (which you need to do) and into finding out the main problems you have to solve to get something live.
And once you've got something live, you've built your mental framework that you can "hang" everything else you learn on.
The company may not object to your rate if they found you directly, but your rate + recruiters expense is more than they were expecting. But all you hear is, "hey bud, that's a little too high of a rate, isn't it? Why don't you come on down to something a bit more conservative" And your rate isn't too high, its just too high when he adds in his cut.
This might be a personal startup that you know is already defeated, or a client that asks for a never ending series of changes and revisions that you aren't getting paid for, or a well-paying client whose project keeps growing and getting farther and farther from launching?
Just a thought.
Joel's method would have made me drop out and convinced me that programming was terribly boring-- much like a how a kid who wants to play the piano would feel after starting out on 6-months of only scales.
I learned so quickly because I loved it, and I loved it because I could be instantly productive making apps with Ruby on Rails. There was still a lot to learn, but those things could be learned later "in the field" as they were relevant.
Steps to prepare: think of the power outages of a hurricane, with the rioters of London, with the austerity of the 30's depression. What would you want in advance to prepare for some combination of either or all of those happening in the near future?
Those spoils paid high wages for the US middle class because it needed those workers for its factories and companies. After a few decades the advantages of the spoils of war evened out with other countries (catch ups in capital, education, strong legal systems) and technology for outsourcing and cheap shipping broke up the US middle classes prior monopoly on US factory/company jobs.
1) write tests first because then you can write something ugly that works and then refactor underneath passing test coverage
2) expose yourself to other peoples code. My tendency is to stare at my own stuff all day (or other people's unattractive code). A natural place to look at good code is to be quick to open up libraries you are using in a project and rummage through them as the need naturally comes up in your work
Let that be a call for people to develop a) Rails experience b) testing, refactoring, working with legacy code experience
Because it means that there are going to be a lot of 3+ year old projects in 2 years that will need those skills.