Ask HN: I learned RoR... what next?

Re:Ask HN: I learned RoR... what next? by pedalpete on Sunday February 05, 2012 @01:54PM (#3554804)

You may have learned how to build a site with RoR, but have you learned how to be a great developer? I wish I had when I was starting out and didn't get into bad habits.

Do you know how best to test your application? Do you know how to best deploy your apps? Do you know how to write good documentation?

It isn't the sexy stuff, and I still don't do enough of it, but I think if you get into these good habits now, the benefits will pay off in the long run (or so I hear anyway).

Though I agree with skrebbel, that if you find something you really want to build, that will often lead you to decisions of what to learn next, I think you can have some more guidance here.

I wouldn't jump into MongoDB and Coffeescript right away. Mongo is a specific tool for specific projects.

I wouldn't jump right into Coffeescript either, I think it is good to know proper Javascript (or some might disagree, but for the most part jQuery suffices at this point).

It looks like you used html5 boilerplate. How well do you understand it? I couldn't tell from the css, are you using SASS or similar CSS tool? I'd recommend that.

Javascript will be very important going forward, and I personally believe that most of my time is spent building front-end rather. Probably 3/4 of my time is spent on css and javascript. I'm building in Backbone now, but putting in and taking out of a database is pretty basic for the most part. I've started doing some NLP stuff, and still, the majority of my time is spent on front-end coding.

Summary, make sure you've got a good foundation for general best practices, spend your time becoming a great front-end coder.

By the ways, I don't understand what showwwwdown is, but you've built a nice looking site.

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Re:Ask HN: I learned RoR... what next? by holgersindbaek on Sunday February 05, 2012 @02:31PM (#3554935)

Thanks for the time you took answering my noob'ish questions :-).

There is still A LOT i need to learn about RoR and general programming... definitely!

I'm using HTML5 boilerplate for the site and using regular CSS and jQuery. I also spent a lot time front-end coding (you always end up doing that) on showwwdown and I think I learned some very nice things in the process.

What's the difference between sass and .less? I've messed a bit around with twitter bootstrap 2.0 and they are using .less. It's a very sexy way to write css, but I hate the fact you have to convert the .less files to css before you deploy.

Would you really work directly with javascript? Not with one of the frameworks? I hate javascript!

Thanks for the complement. Showwwdown is a site where you can start a competition if you have a dribbble invite to hand out and then people can post their best work to win that invite. Follow @showwwdown and I'll let you know when the next competition starts :-).

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