After evolving for 18 years, I feel Rails is at a stage where it is a bit overwhelming for new developers to get started, because of the surface area of its features. This talk proposes a different approach to teaching Rails that is much easier, more comprehensive, and less confusing. In this workshop, we will build a few examples scripts to understand Rails better.
Ruby is easy. The idea is to use that easy and slowly introduce people to “some” gems that do one thing and solve a problem. Explore how those problems being solved are from different areas related to web development. Then create a Rails application that includes “some” gems introduced earlier and are combined in a single Rails application with Railties. That is - we delve into just the ActiveRecord to start with and see what problem it solves and how. Followed by Rake, ActionMailer, Templating, ActiveModel, ActiveSupport, etc. For each of the dependencies mentioned, a separate plain Ruby app is created and explored.
After introducing separately, combining modules to create a single Rails app is a voila moment. I think this approach helps dissect Rails better and takes the “Rails is magic” part away for beginners.
The workshop will take a few ideas from above and ask participants to write code, they will also get sample code and instructions. Not all code can be written in 2 hours for dissecting Rails, but the workshop will try to cover important parts and set up a path to continue further.