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!SLIDE subsection

Ruby On Rails

History

Ruby On Rails was extracted from 37signals' Basecamp by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
July 2004: first released as open source
Feb 2005: first external commit rights
Apr 2007: Twitter presents on scalability
Oct 2007: ships with Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard"
Feb 2008: GitHub.com launches
2007: De-facto standard for new web startups in Silicon Valley

Philosophy

Opinionated
Convention over configuration
DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
- Less code means it's easier to maintain & modify
Test Driven Development (TDD)
"Low in ceremony"
- Minimal code - maximal effect

How You Will Learn

Exploration: experiment, play
Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- Initially as a learning methodology
- Later as a development methodology
Ask questions
Learn to find your own answers

It Works Best, When...

Active participation
Try something new
Team Effort
- Pairing

Tool Chain

Linux/Mac
git -- revision control
RVM -- Ruby version manager
gems -- Ruby libraries & management
rake -- maintenance tasks
ruby
RSpec -- testing framework
Rails
MySQL

Help! So much new stuff?!

Many new technologies and tools
But:
- They are designed to let you be productive when you know only a little
- Deeper understanding unlocks more power, but is not a prerequisite to accomplish something
Strong generalists over narrowly-focused experts
Breadth over depth