Interns can Learn Ruby/Rails Quickly

• kevin
• June 20th, 2008
• 01:47:18 PM

This has been pretty awesome week for the ol’ FPP. As Bob already indicated, we’ve been busy implementing Erin #2’s design in with the code and markup. Basically, that means a lot of fiddling with HTML, CSS, and some javascript to make all the magic start happening.

Interestingly, neither Dusty or myself have written much of any code for the project. But, that’s not to say the project’s codebase isn’t sufficiently awesome.

One concern that Dusty and I had long before we started the internship: could interns with little-to-no experience with Ruby/Ruby on Rails learn quickly enough to be productive over the course of a 4 month project?

The overwhelmingly apparent answer is yes: Al and Bob have rapidly picked up Ruby/Ruby on Rails.

I attribute this quick adaption to the elegance and ease of use of Ruby and the Rails framework. As Al pointed out, often times, the language just makes a lot of sense; it behaves as one would intuitively expect.

Additionally, the availability of numerous Rails plugins helps speed up development immensely. Since they’re open source, plugins also double as great code examples (well, most of them anyway).

Another factor: about a month or so before the internship started, shortly after we made our hiring decisions, we sent Al and Bob a few books to help jump start their Ruby/Ruby on Rails knowledge.

Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition
The Ruby Programming Language

We also threw in a classic, just for good measure.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Lastly, one could argue that both Al and Bob may possibly be bright individuals… imagine that! ;p