RailsTips

This is similar to John Nunemaker's fantastic talk/blog-post called I Have No Talent. Here's his post: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-talent/ and slides: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/04/18/i-have-no-talent-redux/

Same here. http://railstips.org/ is always a great place for Rails, well, tips from John Nunemaker. There's 74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials: http://www.softwaredeveloper.com/features/74-ruby-on-rails-resources-t… (not sure if this is dated or not) 19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don't Know: http://www.rubyinside.com/19-rails-tricks-most-rails-coders-dont-know-… Mashable's 20+ Tools for RoR Development: http://mashable.com/2007/09/30/ruby-on-rails-toolbox/ Like PHP and libraries, a lot of Rails is plugins: 10 Must-Have Rails Plugins: http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2008/6/16/10-must-have-rails-plugins and Top 11 Rails Plugins: http://www.juixe.com/techknow/index.php/2006/07/05/top-11-rails-plugin…

I wish I had happened on this article 10 years ago ... I was always very good at school, so I picked up what I thought were bad habits. Reading this now, it's clear that what I was doing was protecting myself from failure. When I'd do badly on a test in a class that I thought I should do well in, I'd stop taking the class seriously so that when I got a 'C' I could kid myself and say "I did that and wasn't even really trying" Oddly enough, I never made much of the fact that if I really wanted to do well in a class (because I was in love with the subject teacher for example ... :D) I could actually put the work in to get to the top of the class ... I just put it down to being smart. This had a lot of bad repercussions when I went to college. For the first time in my life I was not only competing with a shitton of people just as smart as me, but almost as many people who were WAAAAAY smarter. Trying really really hard to only make B's was a huge blow to my psyche and I was very demoralized and uninspired for a long time. It wasn't until I realized that not only did it take hard work, but for me, inspiration or passion was necessary to truly excel at something. That's when I realized that I just had to shun things I really wasn't interested in and devote myself to things that I really wanted to be good at. Even nowadays, I still look at people in this field who I consider quasi geniuses (DHH, Yehuda, Resig) and wonder if I can ever get to that level, and whenever I doubt…

I'm not sure what your age has to do with this submission, I know a guy who wrote a simple operating system with 15 and never put his age online just to get 'real feedback' as he put it. Edit: After looking at the code it also becomes apparent that you did not write an "XML-to-JSON converter" but just put a (very simple) web-frontend in front of the crack-library. ( http://www.railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/04/01/crack-the-easiest-wa… ) Not to discourage you, but I don't think the title is really honest this way.

Gaug.es uses Mongo. Its data model is pretty simple (just counters), but he has blogged about the approach in detail. MongoDB Counters: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/06/28/counters-everywhere/ http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/07/31/counters-everywhere-part… Kestrel: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2012/03/05/misleading-title-about-q… Gets some decent traffic and works well. http://twitter.com/jnunemaker/status/282141258816827393

I also find it very helpful to spiff up my prompt when changing into a git repo: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/02/02/bedazzle-your-bash-promp…

There's a better article on the rationale here: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/01/27/data-modeling-in-perform…

One pain point I've had since switching from Basic Auth has the lack of debugging via a terminal and curl. That was pretty useful. For Ruby-minded folks there's http://github.com/marcel/twurl which is effectively curl that uses OAuth - though it isn't the same. John Nunemaker wrote a tutorial on how to get get up and running with OAuth pretty quickly (though it is for the Ruby/Rails audience) http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/03/29/oauth-explained-and-what… . I'll admit getting started with OAuth takes some time to ramp up at first, but that ramp up time gets smaller each subsequent app.

> Every time I try to learn programming, it feels painfully slow compared to other things I've picked up. It's probably slow because you're not having fun with it. You're probably not having fun with it because you're not solving a compelling goal. Ask yourself whether you're learning "just to learn it" or are you trying to solve a problem and this particular language/api/compiler/implementation will help you achieve that goal. I might be presumptuous here (and I apologize if I'm wrong) but the times I've found myself stuck "learning" have been when I was just going through the lessons for the heck of it, without a real goal in mind, without something to accomplish. Also, have a look at this: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-talent/ I found it inspirational.

I've been using MongoDB to rewrite the activity feed on one of my apps. I wouldn't use it for everything though (not just yet anyway). Having said that, the guys behind Harmony (http://get.harmonyapp.com/) use MongoDB for everything, as far as I know: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/12/18/why-i-think-mongo-is-to-…

If you're in Ruby land, consider Isaac (nice demo at http://railstips.org/2008/11/14/sinatra-for-irc) or Autumn (http://github.com/RISCfuture/autumn/tree/master). Isaac is particularly syntactically appealing.

New does travel quick. I was just reading about this thing this morning. http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/01/27/data-modeling-in-perform… So John in the above link was talking about how when you scale, you end up looking at bottlenecks, which are usually slow data accesses, and moving them into some sort of key-value store--that usually are based on a key-value access pattern. So by the time you're well into scaling your app, you noticed that much of your data access has turned into limiting yourself to doing key lookups to attain the performance you need. Since (according to his experiences scaling) most of the performance bottlenecks seem to have this pattern, he asked, "what if you restricted your data access to just using key-value pairs from the very beginning?" That way you avoid some of the data access headaches later on. In answering that question, this is what they got.

Warning, link dump ahead. Start with: http://tryruby.org/ Then try: http://railsforzombies.org/ Other people have asked the same thing and received helpful answers: http://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/dchql/what_is_a_great_curriculu… http://ask.metafilter.com/165590/Rapid-Ruby-on-Rails-indoctrination http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on-rails Free programming books here, there are some RoR examples: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-pro… Rails tips: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/10/14/stop-googling/ (I liked this article but the whole site might have good resources.) There is a community specifically for mentoring: http://www.railsmentors.org/ And here's a general Rails community link: http://www.workingwithrails.com/ Not my favorite site but here's a good article on freelancing: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/26/successful-freelancing-with… Rails Rumble, get some app ideas from here once you build your skills: http://railsrumble.com/ Of course, Google "_why". Read about "why the lucky stiff". Read lots about him and see where it leads you.

This is sort of a link dump but with some clicking around you should find some good stuff. Good luck! http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts http://railsforzombies.org/ http://www.workingwithrails.com/ http://www.railsmentors.org/ http://blog.envylabs.com/2010/12/rails-3-cheat-sheets/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on-rails http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/10/14/stop-googling/