Hi, my name is Cameron Youngblood 👋🤠
I write about the experience of learning Ruby on Rails from a beginner's perspective. New article each week.
I'm currently looking for a junior Rails position!
Follow me or shoot me a DM on Twitter → @youngbloodcyb
Introduction
While I've been coding for some time, I’m relatively new to the Ruby on Rails community. My background is primarily in frontend JavaScript, but I have some amateur experience in Java, Python, and SQL. Coming to Ruby has made me love coding more than I ever have before, which is honestly something I didn’t think was possible!
One of the things that drew me to Ruby in the first place was the community. What I saw from the outside looking in was a group of people who are extremely passionate about development and helping others achieve success. In the limited time I’ve spent learning this language and framework, I’ve felt immense support. The community around Rails is undoubtedly the most supportive and kindest out of any development group I’ve found.
Another reason why I was drawn to Ruby was because I’ve heard consistently that Ruby and Rails make the best development experience in the world. As a beginner, this is obviously extremely appealing. I have worked with other libraries and frameworks and have thought to myself, “there has to be a better way to do this.” And, so far, I can honestly say Rails has exceeded my expectations for what a full stack framework can be.
While learning Rails has been (and continues to be) a great experience, I wouldn’t say it’s the most beginner friendly framework out there. In fact, as I’ve been learning it, I can understand why many people flee to flashy JavaScript stacks. So far, I’ve had to put in much more effort to hit the ground running than I did with JavaScript. In my opinion, it’s much easier to get rolling with a Next.js app than to build out an equivalent app in Rails. But, I recognize how much more a Rails app can be with less code, and I’m willing and hungry to put in the effort to eventually master the framework.
Among people learning to code, I constantly see fewer beginners even consider Ruby and Rails as an option. Even though I’m also very much a beginner, I’m hoping to do my part in revitalizing an interest in a language and framework that I’ve already grown to love. This is my primary motivation behind writing this series. By sharing my own experiences learning Rails, I hope to bring awareness to things that may be more difficult for beginners like me to grasp.
By writing these articles, my intent is not to degrade Ruby, Rails, or anyone in the development community. These are simply my experiences. Throughout this series, I’m going to cover my experience learning a breadth of different topics within Rails. Some of them will be bite-sized things like specific gems, while others may be core Rails topics such as Active Record. Lastly, I just want to welcome any and all feedback. If anything I say is inaccurate, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter and correct me! Thanks for being here, please enjoy this series "Junior Ruby Review".
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