learn-ruby VS Roda

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.

Roda (roda.jeremyevans.net)

Jeremy also maintains an awesome web framework called Roda. It's lightweight, fast, and easy to use when you don't need the heft of Rails.

I've been on the Roda [0] and Sequel [1] framework for over 10 years now across various projects. Even after all these years, starting a project in this stack feels like a breath of fresh air even compared to the newer language/frameworks that jabe come out since.

Jeremy Evans is the creator and maintainer of both of these Ruby gems and is super helpful in resolving ask kinda of issues.

[0]: https://roda.jeremyevans.net/

[1]: https://sequel.jeremyevans.net/

My memory is failing me on the specifics, but I posted this issue on roda, which then led to this other issue in omniauth, plus 2 MRs on omniauth and rack-protection for doc updates.

You could pick up a framework like Phoenix, or Remix (the newest kid on the block) and I'm sure you'd get plenty far with either - and if you want ruby, try Roda. You might not have ready made tools with the newer frameworks, so watch out for that. But they have the advantage of doing thing slightly differently.

Even though Rodauth is built on top of Roda and Sequel, it can work as a Rack middleware in any Ruby web framework. In the beginning, there was a demo app showing how Rodauth can be used in Rails, which leveraged the (now discontinued) roda-rails gem. However, the integration felt fairly raw, and definitely lacked the ergonomics Rails developers are used to.

I'm a big fan of Sinatra, but recently I came across Roda which is by Jeremy Evan's whose wonderful ORM gem Sequel I've used in several projects. Looking at the documentation, Roda seems quite nice and performance gain is always appreciated.

For anything but a large app, Roda is well worth considering. It's not the easiest for beginners, due to its philosophy of being bare-bones by default but highly extendable. But it's gradually becoming integrated into Bridgetown, whose batteries-included approach is making Roda much more accessible.