I came to the realization that I am a long way away from where I am now to where I want to be with regards to mastering Ruby.
There are just so much to learn and the wealth of information out there can be overwhelming sometimes. It’s not just the language that I need to learn but also the pratices (BDD, TDD), the frameworks (Rails - y u so black magic?), patterns (Ruby is NOT Java).
But that’s OK - this journey will take me longer than I expected and I can live with that. What I really need is focus and ignore all distractions.
What are the distractions? Latest trends - looking at you JS stuffs - Node, CoffeeScript and friends. Information overload - I have taken steps to fix this:
- Unsubscribed from ColdFusion bloggers feed and mailing lists - not relevant for me at this point of time
- Trim the noise from Twitter by unfollowing people - wasted a lot of time reading tweets that I don’t care from people that I don’t know. I intend to cap my follow number to 100.
- Filtering Ruby information to my level - for example: some of Ruby Rogues episodes (metaprogramming) is just beyond my comprehension at this time.
Focus on what specifically? Well, Ruby of course! Goalwise, this year:
- Getting better at TDD especially getting better at writing specs
- Understanding Ruby and OOP in Ruby better
- Understanding Rails better especially ActiveRecord (maybe enroll in owning rails course)