The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

I spent Friday and Saturday up in beautiful Reston, VA (beautiful if you like miles and miles of office parks, parking lots, and crawling traffic, that is). I braved the wilds of Northern Virginia to particpate in the very first Pragmatic Rails Studio class – two days of learning about Ruby on Rails from the guys who wrote the book on it.

I haven’t done any work with Ruby, and don’t really know much about MVC concepts in general, so I went into the class with that perspective. It seemed like 2/3 of the attendees were Java developers, which was kind of weird. I guess since Java is so irrelevant in the circles that I move through, I assume that nobody uses it for anything. Perspective, I guess. I was joined on this quest by #void Godfather and all-around great guy Mark Cornick, who was nice enough to provide a place for me to crash in Greenbelt, MD.

The class was structured so that you could follow along with or without a laptop – I’d say nearly everyone in the class had a laptop. I was running the Locomotive package on my PowerBook. The presenters ran Macs as well. The first day was spent going from a bare Rails install through steps to get a simple shopping cart application up and running. The setup was designed from a real-world perspective – you started with something basic, got it working, and then revised the design and code accordingly. I found that approach easy to work with, as you tended to move in smaller chunks. The day ended with some examples of AJAX, which was fun to do.

The second day went into things like unit and performance testing, allowed a long lunch for us to develop our own basic “To-Do” application, and ended with a kind of grab-bag approach to various topics such as load balancing and application distribution.

Of course, this being the first class, there were a few rough spots. The biggest one was that while they encouraged you to develop along with them, a great approach, there were times when they’d “magically” jump ahead, which really screwed with the people trying to code along and led to most of the “come help me!” code problems that popped up. I think they’re planning on using a “code checkpointing” system in future classes, which should remove that problem.

Aside from that, though, the class was well worth the money. Dave and Mike did a great job as presenters, keeping the pace quick and the information flowing. I feel like I have a better understanding of the concepts that I read about in the Rails book now, which should help if I start developing applications. And it’s fun to be a member of the “Golden Spike” club as the first people to ever participate in a Pragmatic Studios Rails class. And if you weren’t there, you can pretend you were by checking out the pictures on Flickr. You can’t have my T-shirt or bumper sticker, though.

So the class is highly recommended on this end – if they come near you, it’s worth the money to go attend.