What I Learned at Open Hack Naperville

Kevin P. Davis, Ph. D4/23/13

http://openhack.github.io/ Simple purpose: “Code together, on

anything” A little food A little introduction Then code for a couple hours @OpenHackNAP, but there are many others:

it’s a movement

What is an OpenHack

Downtown Naperville, 33 ½ Jefferson TwoCanoes Software HashRocket Very typical looking startup Macs everywhere Beanbag chairs everywhere I mean, really hipster. Might as well have

been Austin. Or Portland. Or Boulder.◦ And very welcoming

The Environment

Couple .NET guys Apple guys Java guy Mainframe guy Bunch of Rails/Ruby guys

So we didn’t have that much in common. Except the guy bit.

The Participants

Instead of co-hacking, the night turned into a presentation (by the will of the participants and their curiosity), with lots of Q&A

Starting with http://jonallured.com/2012/10/17/setting-up-a-new-rails-app.html, we built, tested, and deployed a Rails application to production (on the for reals interwebs)

Off the Rails, and On the Rails

Functional programming paradigm If you’re getting started, use RVM

◦ Package management ◦ Keeps your versions clean and you smiling

Gems are the spiritual precursors to NuGet Packages

Rake is “ruby make” – think NAnt

Ruby

MVC Framework Wildly popular “Optimized for Programmer Happiness” “Convention over Configuration”

Rails

ActiveRecord – Architectural Pattern◦ Relational database◦ Instance of active record tied to row in a database◦ Ruby has an ActiveRecord library

Postgres – Open source database◦ Actively maintained and under development◦ RDBMS◦ Since 1986 (!)

Postgres/ActiveRecord

BDD framework Provides automated scenario testing

◦ Given [and]◦ When ◦ Then

Compare to NBehave

Cucumber

YAML Ain’t Markup Language (Views) Requires more research. I’m going to admit

this is a mystery to me. Views written in YAML rendered into HTML

YAML

DVCS All the cool kids are doing it Job interview question : “What’s your

GitHub handle?” Can be local or use GitHub

Git

Application hosting First dyno is free (disk + cpu + network) Solid integration with git Easy to provision and publish

Heroku

Apparently the market is sick (the good kind)

Enormous supply/demand gap for Rails When asked why, the answer was

“Community” Salaries look competitive with .NET

(glassdoor.com) Dev bootcamps and other Ruby outreach

The Market

Beware. The Rails Community is a Cult.

Conclusion

http://rubyonrails.org/ http://cukes.info/ http://www.yaml.org/ https://www.heroku.com/ - free dyno https://github.com/And for the truly demented (er… dedicated) http://devbootcamp.com/

Tools for Further Learning