This summer, I’m learning Ruby on Rails at Metis, a 12-week class taught by some great folks from thoughtbot. This post is part of a series sharing my experience and some of the things I’m learning.

Most people love the responsive experience of using AJAX-y web pages. Creating that functionality, on the other hand, is not always so enjoyable: asynchronous requests can be difficult to code and debug.

It may not be a surprise that Rails helps us abstract some of the more challenging AJAX code. In this post, we’ll take a look at a basic AJAX request constructed with vanilla jQuery; then, we’ll check out the tools Rails gives us to create and respond to asynchronous requests.

This summer, I’m learning Ruby on Rails at Metis, a 12-week class taught by some great folks from thoughtbot. This post is part of a series sharing my experience and some of the things I’m learning.

Until a few months ago, Vim was a program I had never considered using. I had always perceived Vim to be an editor with a steep learning curve that wasn’t worth my time as a web programmer. It was a tool, I thought, used mostly by people who spent their time writing obscure shell scripts or coding the Linux kernel in C.

As it turns out, I was wrong, and I’m glad I was.

This summer, I’m learning Ruby on Rails at Metis, a 12-week class taught by some great folks from thoughtbot. This post is part of a series sharing my experience and some of the things I’m learning.

As we’ve started learning Rails the past two weeks, one of our instructors, Goose, has been encouraging us to code using an approach he calls Error-Driven Development.

Much like its older cousin, Test-Driven Development, an error-driven approach follows a short, incremental, feedback-driven cycle when coding. As a new Rails developer, the habits built through Error-Driven Development will help prepare me to learn Test-Driven Development in the future.

This summer, I’m learning Ruby on Rails at Metis, a 12-week class taught by some great folks from thoughtbot. This post is part of a series sharing my experience and some of the things I’m learning.

With apologies to the late Judy Garland, let’s start out by acknowledging that the Model-View-Controller architecture isn’t nearly as frightening as lions, tigers, or bears. After all, we are wearing our Ruby slippers.

*crickets*

Anyway, bad jokes aside, this way of organizing an application can seem intimidating to the uninitiated. In this post, we’ll take a look at what MVC means, and what this architecture looks like in a Rails application.

This summer, I’m learning Ruby on Rails at Metis, a 12-week class taught by some great folks from thoughtbot. This post is part of a series sharing my experience and some of the things I’m learning.

This week at Metis, we’re using Ruby and Sinatra to get started with some basic dynamic web programming as a stepping stone to Rails. At its core, Sinatra is a Ruby gem that allows you to specify how an app will respond to different http requests (GET, POST, etc.) and routes (the part of the URL after the domain, like / or /blog or /blog/post/123).

In this post, we’ll walk through creating a basic “hello world”-style app that offers a greeting to the user, customized based on the url.