Ruby Mendicant University: Round 2
Note: I’m going to break this into several posts about the philosophical and technical learnings from my Ruby Mendicant University Web Development course:
Part 1: About the course & what it was like
Part 2: A first-timer’s process of styling a site
Part 3: What I learned from the course
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll already know that I participated in the September session of Ruby Mendicant University’s Core Skills course.
Much like the mafia, one doesn’t graduate RMU, you just get pulled in deeper. There are course offerings for alumni that range from more advanced Object-Oriented design practices, writing skills, statistics, and more. After a few months of relaxing mixed with a little bit of mentoring and casual participation, it was time for me to dig back in for the first Web Development course.
This time Jordan Byron (@jordan_byron on Twitter) ran the course, and it was his first time teaching. Anyone who has endeavored to tutor, advise, teach, or mentor knows that this is about an order of magnitude harder than you’d expect.
It was clear that Jordan cared deeply about helping us succeed, but that didn’t change the fact that everyone involved was biting off a bit more than they could chew. But for my part, Jordan’s help meant the difference between success and failure, and I learned a great deal thanks to his oversight and involvement.
For me, I’ve been learning Ruby and web development mostly by myself in my spare time for the last couple of years, and the sudden boost you get by having guided, time-bound projects is staggering. Even having been through it twice, it’s tough to imagine learning so much in less than a month.
Where I started from:
I had zero experience with CSS or true web design before this course. While RMU students must pass a Ruby-oriented challenge to get in, setting a baseline for Gregory Brown to work from, no such bar existed for the Web Development course.
This put Jordan at a bit of a disadvantage compared to the other courses offered within RMU. I showed up with no existing skills, expecting to be tutored in the most basic aspects of styling web applications.
The course:
The course itself was tough. Here were the requirements, roughly, in my words:
Submit an existing project for peer review, and review at least 3 classmates’ projects. Keep the discussion relatively high-level, more about frameworks, challenges, etc. rather than implementation details.
Take an existing project from barebones functionality to a fully styled site.
Create a geo-oriented project using Google Maps or similar geo API.
For me, step 2 took the lion’s share of the time. As it wound up, this list was a little *too* tough, and relatively few (or perhaps none?) completed all the requirements. The session was deemed a good pilot for future sessions, and a lot was learned on all sides.
“Uh oh, I’m gonna drown.”
There wasn’t a lot of additional instruction. There was a goal, and a list of potential resources and tools (put together by Jordan and augmented by the students). Jordan’s work is also open-sourced, so it was possible to go see how he solved similar problems if you were willing to dig into the code, though I discovered this a bit too late.
I quickly realized that I was already in over my head, and this “sink or swim” course would likely see me fail unless I drastically upped my output. For a relatively experienced web developer, this would have been 5-10 hours a week.
But like the core course, I found myself far enough behind that I required about 20-25 hours a week to catch up to where I should have been in starting the course. I’ll talk about why that may not have been such a good thing in the final post.
First assignment: Peer review
The first assignment was straightforward, simple, and fun. Our job was to post some work we’d done, ask questions about it, and comment on the work and questions of our peers.
I wound up commenting on all but two of my classmates’ projects, and hoping in vain that I’d get back around to the other two. I learned a couple of things that I was immediately able to do to improve my site, and saw some cool implementations that others came up with.
I did have to run out and research a little before I felt comfortable answering a lot of the questions. All in all, the first assignment was a bit time-consuming, but not particularly difficult.
Second assignment: Style a website from scratch
I’ll cover this at length in my next post. Basically, it took all but the first few and last couple of days.
Third assignment: Geo-aware application
I basically flubbed the final assignment, having left myself with less than 48 hours to complete it. After Jordan cleaned up my messy code, I got a basic mapping tool running using GeoKit to geocode an address, and Google Maps to display it. All in all, not my finest hour, but I’ll cover a bit of what I learned in the final post.
In Part 2, I’ll go through some of the implementation details, and what I had to learn in order to take a webapp from a barebones implementation to a fully-styled, “invite your friends” site.
I’ll also ask the flame-baiting question, “Does CSS suck?”
