Hi! I am Jérôme Sadou, Software Engineer at Business Bank Group, Inc. working on the ALL-IN project.

After more than 10 years working with PHP for my applications back-end, I made the jump to Ruby. More precisely after using all this time, custom frameworks, Zend 1/2 or Symfony 2, joining Business Bank Group I started to work with Ruby on Rails framework. This is actually one of the main reason I took this job as I wanted to learn something new (for me) and challenge myself. There are plenty of jobs in PHP (it runs about 80% of the web) and I could continue for a while just with it but I was feeling it was time to try something different and in depth. (I also did some projects using Node.js, a bit of Python and long long time ago Java).

To prepare myself to join the company (I was freelancing for 5 years) I took a course on Udemy : "Getting started with Ruby on Rails" by Paul Krause. The course is a good introduction to Ruby and Rails. For a programmer beginner there's quite enough to learn even in HTML5 and CSS3 towards the end of the course, for a more experienced developer in an other language like me, it was good enough to "hold my hand" for a start but then it was a bit slow. But I think it was a good idea to follow the course to get the basis right.

After following 40% of the course I built a small app to test my knowledge, a simple API app with a front-end in AngularJS as it was the couple I was going to use the work on ALL-IN. Obviously building something is the best way to learn as you quickly encounter real world problems like : "how to upload pics to AWS through my API when using Heroku" for example. Just with something as simple as this kind of task, you learn a lot. And it gave me a bit of confidence before to join the team.

There are many ways to learn about Ruby and Ruby on Rails online. In Japan, books are also still very popular, there is a full range of Ruby (or any language) books published, nothing to compare with France for example. That surprised me 10 years ago and still impresses me now. As for me I mostly stick to online resources.

So, on Udemy only, you have a about 50 different courses to learn about Ruby ( / on Rails), it's up to you to choose the one that will suit you the best depending on your background.

Some other popular or interesting online resources to learn that were pointed at me :

Complete Courses :

• Ruby : Learn to program in Ruby, a flexible language used to create sites : https://www.codecademy.com/tracks/ruby

• Rails : http://www.theodinproject.com/ruby-on-rails

More advanced :

• Screencasts for intermediate Ruby on Rails developers : https://gorails.com/

• Knowing how to write good specs : "{ rspec guidelines with ruby }" : http://betterspecs.org/

(This was the most difficult part for me to grasp when I joined the team)

• You're a Ruby developer, and you're ready for more : http://www.rubytapas.com

Learning Ruby on Rails was/is just one part of the things I had to do when joining the ALL-IN project, you can read about our stack in the previous articles (in Japanese, but Google Translate does a pretty good job now) written by our CTO, Takenaka San. You will see that there's quite some material.

Next time I will pick and share some interesting code snippets that I (or one of my colleagues) wrote during the development of ALL-IN.

If you are up for some challenges in Tokyo or in Matsue ("Ruby City" in Shimane Prefecture), we are recruiting. Apart from some experience in the web stack we are using or/and an ability to learn fast, speaking and reading a conversational Japanese is preferred.

If you want to meet me, I'll be at the Matsue Ruby Kaigi 07 on September 26th. [http://matsue.rubyist.net/matrk07/#]

よろしくお願いします！

ジェローム　サドゥ

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