Rails Screencasts and my career
The Rails team have finally updated that old “How to make a blog in 15 minutes” screencast. The new one is much swisher, with Ajax, XML and JSON.
I’m a little bit sad because the original screencast changed my career path completely. It might have happened anyway, but I think I can identify finding Rails as an important moment, and I found it by watching that screencast. Before I wanted to be a banker or consultant of some kind, now I realize that what I really like doing is messing around with computers. And I’m good at it!
I played around with computers when I was a kid, but left it behind when I did my A-levels and went to university. It wasn’t until 2006 that I started programming again, in Ruby, and wondered how I could have forgotten how fun it all was!
So thanks DHH and the Rails team. You made programming fun enough that it sucked me in and changed my life completely.
A similar story for me too. I had always wanted to mess around with computers but I had always found programming was too intimidating for a beginner to get into and get self taught. Then I found the Blog in 15 minutes screencast and found that Rails and Ruby striped away all that obscurity and intimidating looking syntax and header filed etc and opened up the world of programming to me! Now I love programming and building Rails apps, I can’t get enough! Add me to the list of people whose lives changed after Build a Blog in 15 minutes!
And by the way, I came across your post via the Great Oops’ twittering about it!
I agree 124%
I’ve been posting screencasts of my first real-world rails app and it’s been fast, fun and easy. It was delivered on time and my client was really happy with the results.
I started my second project on Friday and I’ll be done today. And I’m doing it in 2.2, doing it faster and with much cleaner and DRYer code than last time.
Thanks guys! I’ve been meaning to share for a while (like when DHH asked for stories a month or so ago) but I never got round to it.
@david: took me a minute to figure out what you meant by the Great Oops (Whoops?) but get it now - duh! How about that eh?
@Daniel Oh, “whoops” is it? I guess that makes me a fair sized Oops doesn’t it!