learn-ruby VS Discourse

More consistent learning. The job search also gave me a chance to get back to my Ruby/web development learning roadmap. I realized that at my last job, I wasn't consistently spending time improving my skills, outside of whatever I might (if I was lucky) be learning in work projects. It's just hard to fight against the pressure of the day-to-day work. Here are some approaches that I'll try this time around: Disregard immediate applicability and learn something I'm interested in for the sake of expanding my mind. Right now that's learning functional programming. Learn actively, whether by contributing to Exercism's Ruby track, building a collection of Ruby code katas, or maybe even creating a text-based game.

Beyond these basics, I've put together a list of my favorite Ruby/Rails learning resources.

I made the Git list by (1) scouring the Web for recommended resources, then (2) trying out each one to see if it would be worth going through to the end. In case you're curious about which resources didn't make the cut, here's the commit where they are removed.

As a guide to my reflections today, I'll use my "Learning Ruby" roadmap, which originally arose out of the chaos of my bookmark hell, where I was having trouble keeping track of the actually important learning resources. The roadmap worked well for me and eventually I put it up on GitHub because making it public gives me more motivation to keep making progress.

For me, Ruby was a great choice for a career change. I used to be a teacher until I quit in 2020, then over the next 1.5 years I studied and practiced part-time, while working full-time in a remote customer support job. Ever since I started learning Ruby, I've saved my favorite learning resources here: https://github.com/fpsvogel/learn-ruby. Many of them are free.

So I've set out to explore the problem of organizing business logic from more angles than before, using the resources listed below. These lists are excerpted from my "Learning Ruby" road map which I often update, so you may want to find these lists there if this post is old at the time of your reading it. The sections corresponding to the lists below are, at the time of writing, "Rails architecture" and "Rails codebases".

For more resources, here's my list of my favorites: https://github.com/fpsvogel/learn-ruby

I'll tell my story and you can decide if it resonates with you at all. Also these might help you: my Ruby roadmap (favorite learning resources), and my blog post "How to find your first Rails job".

I've made a big list of my favorite learning resources, but here are some possible first steps:

I actually don't know of a good "beyond the basics" Rails course. The one or two that I've seen out there are prohibitively expensive. For me the best way forward has been to improve in specific areas, such as OOP, testing, and SQL basics. I've made a list of my favorite resources in each area, which might help you.

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

Discourse is also open source https://github.com/discourse/discourse

I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.

Why isn't Discourse being listed here for forum software? It's open source and designed for modern communities. https://www.discourse.org/

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

I was reading mastodon.social's privacy policy, and noticed that the link at the bottom to Discourse's privacy policy links to Discourse's Github. I'm surprised because I thought it would be the privacy policy on discourse.org.

Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, and time.

You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Nice examples of what it looks like:

https://discourse.nixos.org/

https://forum.level1techs.com/

As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-dis...

As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...

So, I'm asking myself if you would be interested in joining a good old-fashioned forum (probably using discourse as software) in order to communicate with other gifted people around the globe. And please add any ideas you might have for a platform like this.