Getting Into Rails Development

[DAZ]

Hi everyone,

I've been a long time member of this group and been coding in Ruby since Rails first came out, but it's only ever been a hobby for me.

I've recently decided to have a career change from teaching to web development and would like to get into Rails development, preferably in Manchester or remote.

I know a lot of you on here are already working as Rails devs - does anybody have any tips about what the best things I should be doing? I'm currently working on building a portfolio, but is there anything I should focus on in particular? And any tips about the best way to find Rails vacancies or opportunities?

I'd also be interested to hear if anyone knows of any opportunities just to get any unpaid Rails development experience.

Thanks,

Daz

[Brandon Burton]

Hey Daz, 

Thanks for reaching out.

I went through a similar transition about 8 years ago so I've certainly had the same questions as yourself!

The best thing in general is to get coding and working on projects that interest you. What worked for me was using a mixture of online tutorials, books, and chatting with the members of NWRUG. A lot has changed since I did this but it seems like a few good resources would be: 

• The Odin Project - They look to have a fairly up-to-date Rails course
  
• GoRails - Has a good set of up-to-date courses and screencasts. I'm pretty sure they have an active Discord as well.
• The Rails Way 7 - If you prefer books then this is a fairly up-to-date one. I'm pretty sure I read "Rails Way 4" when I started.
• First Ruby Friend - A place to find a mentor. Some of the members here are mentors on that program

In terms of finding jobs, that's always a tricky one! I've always found the best way is through meeting people. We'll occasionally have postings here, they'll also have job postings in our sister group LRUG. There's a good site called Otta, which I've used in the past. 

A good way to meet people and learn about openings is at conferences. Brighton Ruby is coming up which many of us will attend. It's certainly a more expensive way to meet people but it's a very good time. I found last year to be really inspiring!

You could also look up the sponsors of past Ruby/Rails conferences to get an idea of which companies hire Ruby devs. 

I hope that helps and please reach out if you still have questions!

Many thanks, 

Brandon

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[DAZ]

Thanks Brandon, that's all really useful.

I've been working through Agile Web Development with Rails 7 and trying to get to grips with Turbo Streams and it's going quite well. Really enjoying using Rails again! I'll just keep building apps to get more practice.

Gorails looks great and seem to have some active forums which will be useful and I've just registered for First Ruby Friend, which seems like a great scheme.

I'll make sure I come to the NWRUG meet ups and might even get to Brighton as well!

Thanks again,

Daz

[Brandon Burton]

No worries at all!

One thing I forgot to mention is that it might help to set yourself a deadline for landing your first developer role. For me, I gave myself a year. It worked in my case but even if it didn't, it helped to focus me on the goal of becoming a software developer. It might work for you too. 

See you soon!

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[DAZ]

Thanks for that tip Brandon - I have a similar goal to be working as a developer by the end of this year! Until then I'll just keep trying to improve my coding and development skills by building things.

Hopefully see you at a meet up soon!

Daz

[Ian Moss]

Hey, 

I would definitely seek out ways to work in teams with others. 

It's non-trivial to find such aspects, and lets-just-say some ruby devs are a bit intimidating (not always deliberately), but working in a team is soo different to working solo. Often much more fun too :)

The recent NWRUG meet was brilliant for this. A good laugh, and showed that great, experienced, people have different strengths, and still all make mistakes. The whole imposter syndrome aspect is very real, but I imagine a very different stress to being infront of a class room of kids, but can be pretty stressful all the same. Defining pyschological safety is not easy for us techies - and the anonymous contributions to open source can feel pretty intimidating or soul destroying when getting comments from PRs without knowing the individual.

FWIW, if you're ever fancying collaborating on a low-carbon startup, your good self, or others reading are welcome to have a chat about our volunteer developer roles with totravelto.com - see https://totravelto.com/developers (in the process of advertising in the short ruby newsletter - a fantastic read :)

Have a good weekend all - lets hope for some sun ey :)

Cheers,

Ian.

https://196destinations.com 

Lets help making choosing the train a little easier.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/196Destinations

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/196_destinations

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/196destinations 

[Paul Bennett-Freeman]

> I'm currently working on building a portfolio, but is there anything I should focus on in particular?

Since you've changed careers, is there anything you could build the plays on that? Something you can spin a narrative around of "As a teacher, I always wanted to do X, and so I built this tool that does it."

Something like "Every term, I'd need to log on to the school web site and copy a pupils grades one by one into a spreadsheet, so I built a web scraper that does that automatically"

When it comes to interviewing, being able to demonstrate you have transferable skills and experience you can apply can give you the edge over another junior developer who might be able to code as well as you, but has nothing else to offer - that's a bit blunt, but recruiters are soulless monsters mostly.

From a more personal perspective, and definitely more controversial, so take this as one person's option: Frontend in Rails (Turbo and Hotwire) is a hot mess and very few companies actually use it. Learning some React, and building against APIs you've written, or other people's APIs is a much more transferable skill set. I'd recommend Noel Rappin's Modern Front-End Development for Rails which covers all bases by including Turbo, Stimulus, React, and TypeScript. That has a more balanced approach than a random person on the internet screaming "Hotwire sucks!" ;) 

[DAZ]

Thanks Ian,

I'd definitely welcome any opportunities to work as part of a team and am considering applying to help out on totravelto! 

Part of teaching computer science involved working with students on projects and I really enjoyed that and they ended up producing some really good work. I definitely would enjoy the buzz of working together with people and bouncing ideas off each other.

Thanks - looks like it might be sunny so far!

Daz

[DAZ]

Thanks Paul. I'm already thinking of some ideas from teaching, but nothing concrete yet! I have a few ideas that I will try and build to get into the swing of development.

I actually already know how to use React and have found using Turbo and Hotwire quite nice in Rails 7 ... that might be a controversial opinion though! Learning how to integrate React with Rails would definitely be useful and perhaps knowing when to reach for Turbo frames and when to use React would be even more useful, so that book looks like it would be a good read.

Thanks again!

Daz

[DAZ]

Also, you mentioned recruiters and they do seem quite soulless ... I've already come across a few that seem to have 'led me on' and then completely ghosted me - not even replying to my emails for updates. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

[Paul Bennett-Freeman]

> Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

Oh, it’s absolutely “normal”. 

In particular never turn down another offer until you’ve got a signed contract from a company and not just a verbal offer via a recruiter. 

On Sat, 20 Apr 2024 at 10:19, DAZ <daz...@gmail.com> wrote:

Also, you mentioned recruiters and they do seem quite soulless ... I've already come across a few that seem to have 'led me on' and then completely ghosted me - not even replying to my emails for updates. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?

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[Rob Whittaker]

Hey, Daz!

This is an excellent question, and I love the responses. I've bookmarked Brandon's, especially for future reference.

thoughtbot offers an "Office Hours" service. You can book a remote session with one of their designers or developers. They are available to answer any questions you may have.

—Rob

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[Tekin Süleyman]

From a more personal perspective, and definitely more controversial, so take this as one person's option: Frontend in Rails (Turbo and Hotwire) is a hot mess and very few companies actually use it. Learning some React, and building against APIs you've written, or other people's APIs is a much more transferable skill set. I'd recommend Noel Rappin's Modern Front-End Development for Rails which covers all bases by including Turbo, Stimulus, React, and TypeScript. That has a more balanced approach than a random person on the internet screaming "Hotwire sucks!" ;) 

Just to offer a counter to this, I would say the JS side of Rails (Stimulus included) has matured a great deal recently, and I have worked with teams that are actively using it in their applications (and migrating away from React in fact).

React has its place for sure, but I would say the whole model of API-driven React based UIs only really fits for a certain level of complexity and scale of team. Certainly having some React experience will broaden the potential job opportunities you can pursue, but I wouldn’t dismiss having a solid knowledge of Turbo, etc, as equally useful.

Tekin

[Will Jessop]

> On 19 Apr 2024, at 13:55, Paul Bennett-Freeman <clic...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm currently working on building a portfolio, but is there anything I should focus on in particular?
>
> Since you've changed careers, is there anything you could build the plays on that? Something you can spin a narrative around of "As a teacher, I always wanted to do X, and so I built this tool that does it."
>
> Something like "Every term, I'd need to log on to the school web site and copy a pupils grades one by one into a spreadsheet, so I built a web scraper that does that automatically"

Agreed, Patrick McKenzie (patio11) once said "My favourite heuristic for SaaS apps still works: there is a good market anywhere someone mails an Excel spreadsheet and they mail it back". It could also be a good heuristic for finding interesting problems to solve to stand out at interview. When you solve the problems it helps to be able to talk about why you made the decisions you made too, rather than just "everyone does". Why did you pick Postgres over MySQL? Why isn't SQLite suitable for most web apps despite being fashionable again? What do you like about Minitest vs Rspec? You don't have to have an answer for everything as you're just starting out, but I think it's worth thinking through as you go.

> From a more personal perspective, and definitely more controversial, so take this as one person's option: Frontend in Rails (Turbo and Hotwire) is a hot mess and very few companies actually use it.

I wouldn't necessarily agree there. Popularity isn't a sign of quality. See PHP, The Javascript tooling ecosystem, Mongo DB, McDonalds etc. There are companies using Turbo and Hotwire and doing so successfully. Not as many as React for sure.

Personal experience, I'd say that using React was the single biggest mistake made in our companies history, it's hindered quality and speed of development as the company has aged. I wish the people who had made the decision years ago had stuck with server-rendered content with something like Stimulus for front end behaviour.

> Learning some React, and building against APIs you've written, or other people's APIs is a much more transferable skill set. I'd recommend Noel Rappin's Modern Front-End Development for Rails which covers all bases by including Turbo, Stimulus, React, and TypeScript. That has a more balanced approach than a random person on the internet screaming "Hotwire sucks!" ;)

This is a reasonable approach. Knowing some several technologies may well help as a junior developer, being able to talk about the differences and why you might choose one over the other would be helpful too.

I'm going to hijack this email to respond to the original :)

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 at 12:47, DAZ <daz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I know a lot of you on here are already working as Rails devs - does anybody have any tips about what the best things I should be doing? I'm currently working on building a portfolio, but is there anything I should focus on in particular? And any tips about the best way to find Rails vacancies or opportunities?

It depends what job you want to go for and what you mean by portfolio. If you're going for a job at an agency then a portfolio of sites you've made might be useful. However, though some people can thrive at agencies they have some significant downsides, especially for people wanting to learn and grow.

As someone who has hired people a big part of what I'm looking for is you to show me that you can think, decide, plan and do. Finding situations where you have thought through a problem, decided what the right solution was, planned how to do it, and then done the work well. Creating n Rails apps with Postgres and Sidekiq that take form data and store it in a database works a small number of times depending on the specifics of the problem solved each time, but doesn't scale.

Things other than a web app that might impress could be things like:

- I did some data analysis using Jupyter Labs/notebooks, Python was a good choice here because…
- I gathered some data using a Raspberry Pi or other device, here's the Ruby code, these are the problems I solved…
- I experimented with benchmarking my Rails apps frontend and/or backend to improve performance, here's what I learned…

Some people with 20 years experience have the same year of experience repeated, even though you're new you should try to show that you've not just got the same experience over and over again.

No-one is expecting you to have rich and varied experience at this stage, but have a think about these as a way to stand out and not fall into the trap of doing the same thing over and over.

Will.

[DAZ]

Wow - these replies are so useful. It's really nice of everyone to help. Hopefully I'll get to meet some of you at the next meet up.

From Brandon's advice I've given myself a year to find something but I'm a bit worried about getting stuck in the 'too old with no experience' trap. But hopefully if I build things and get involved in things, something will come along.

@Rob - the Thoughtbot office hours sounds great ... and I have a few ideas about what I could ask, so will probably try and set one up.

@Tekin - that's good to hear that places are using Turbo. I've used React a fair bit and am actually finding Turbo with Stimulus really nice to use. In fact I spent the weekend hacking together a sort of simplified clone of Stimulus ...

@Will - some great advice there ... I actually did some of that stuff as part of teaching computer science ... the advice about setting myself apart and not just doing the same thing over and over is really useful, as well as thinking about why I make certain decisions about what to use.

... now I just need to think of the ultimate Teach App!

Thanks again everyone!

Daz