My Experience as a Rails Coach

It's Thursday night and I'm typing this at the Munich airport waiting for my flight to Hamburg. I've spent the last 3 days in Bavaria helping two talented PHP developers getting started with Ruby on Rails. It was fun. On the first day I gave a brief introduction to OOP and TDD along with a quick Rails overview. Then we started coding. We set up Subversion, and coded two demo projects by noon, touching on RESTful design and scaffolding, migrations, MVC, tests, and the joy of having ActiveRecord do all the dirty CRUD work. One of the developers then told me that they were very sceptic at first as to why Rails would improve or speed up their development in comparison to PHP. But those few hours already had convinced him why. That was a very satisfying experience. On the second day the same developer had the idea of following through the Depot application demo from the AWDWR book and recording what I do as a screencast. That was a great idea. So we started with the Depot application from scratch, using the new Rails 2.0 way of doing things where necessary or where it made sense. We got to the end of Task C on page 109 on the first day and finished the complete Depot application today with testing and all. So in 3 days we covered A LOT of ground and I have screencasts of developing the whole Depot application with Rails 2. They are pretty raw and they are in German, but they might be helpful to some (if you don't mind my stinking slow iBook and my lame jokes along the way). I'm thinking about making them available on my blog soon. Well, the bottom line is Rails is great and in 3 days you can give a great introduction to this framework with quite a bit of in-depth information.

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