Tyler’s Blog

Yesterday at 5 p.m. I finished instructing my first course on Ruby and Rails. I can say it was an amazing experience for all of us. The course that Dave, Andy, Kevin and I put together some 6 months ago is still excellent stuff. It provided the class with many opportunities to look beyond the beaten path and make some discoveries of their own. We re-implemented the in_place_edit_for method to support validations and put some extra sugar to allow single-line declarations for multiple columns on a model. Like this:

  in_place_edit_for :iteration, :name, :start_date, :end_date

That optimization was suggested by a student on the fourth day, pretty impressive. I think it says a lot about the quality of the course and the exceptional students I had.

Now updated for 1.2.2 I know they’re walking away with the most current Rails knowledge we can provide and the Ruby underpinnings necessary to cut their own path through the framework.

I learned quite a lot myself preparing for and during the course. My students are all veterans of other languages and their expertise generated questions that cut straight to the key points of a topic. They really kept me on my toes. Thank you!

I’m eagerly awating my next course. We have quite a few on the drawing board, so it’s anyone’s guess what I’ll be teaching next. I’d like to instruct a pure TDD course eventually. I think I have a good amount of hard-won knowledge to share on that topic. Of course, I love the rails too.

Whatever happens next doesn’t matter much. The future is bright.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 9:44 am and is filed under Ruby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.