I love programming and when learning a new programming language I feel like a kid in a sandbox, Okay maybe more like a kid in a cool spaceship with really awesome gizmos all over the place, feeling like Luke Skywalker shooting starships down with my mind. Recently my coleagues at Beezond and I started working on a very cool product for our startup and I figured I'd learn Ruby to help out with our backend and API. I currently have a blackbelt in C, Java, Python and C# (Really I quit C# after one date with Linux years back and did not care much for mono, Sorry Microsoft) so learning a new language would not be too hard.

My partner and CTO at Beezond Amarildo Lucas offered me a few books where I could learn more about the language and I quickly got to reading a few of them (Simultaneously). For some reason I decided to drop those for a while and read Zed Shaw's online books (http://learnrubythehardway.org/) I am the type of programmer who just sees programming languages as a tool and never get attached to any one language or bad mouth another after learning the "next big thing". So I went into the relationship with a clear and curious mind. I started the first chapter and knocked the dust out of them all. Whenever I learn a new programming language I do research on it to attain a more in depth knowledge of how it works and even checked out the source code in C for a basic implementation guide. I got familiarized with Ruby's super sexy foreach loop, which I absolutely love.

Ruby's foreach loop.

(0..4).each do |i|
                puts "Your #{i} seconds too late. "
end



						 

I went onto things like Arrays, Hashes, modules, files, command line arguments, Ranges, Iterators, OOP, sockets, composition, mixins and many other topics and really enjoyed learning them.

After two weeks I finished the book and worked on a small css/javascript compressor in Ruby called MinnyFyer, So I can put all the knowledge into practice with a real world problem and after a few hours I completed the first version of the tool and had a few of my more experienced team mates test it out and give me a code review (Which they have not yet done). The code is on github for anyone to checkout and I would appreciate any critique on the code so I can get better at this gem business. Since I like a challenge I logged onto HackerRank.com and started working on some programming problems using Ruby.

So what do I think of her? Well, I think she is sexy elegant and I can easily express myself with her. She is flexible and adaptable and that really has me fancying her even more. A great thing about Ruby is it's community. Unlike the stir Oracle and Microsoft developers make in their communities, Ruby really get's love from it's community and is driven by shear passion. I will soon start learning RoR and jump on the Heroku swing as all the other big boys are doing so I am looking forward to having fun with that. Cheers! My Internet amigos!