Ruby Jumpstart Tutorials & Diversity Statement Posted

The wrapup is complete from last week’s session. I’ve made a few tweaks to the tutorials and posted them in the Resources section. If you’re interested in learning Ruby, check them out!

You can start with Ruby in 100 Minutes which is a super-brief introduction to just what you need to know about Ruby to get working on the projects. You’ll learn about basic method calls, data structures, conditional branching, and the other essentials.

Once you have a little familiarity with Ruby you can jump into JSAttend which builds a program to work with CSV attendee data from a conference. You’ll learn about string manipulation, working with CSV files, creating form letters, and accessing an API from the Sunlight Foundation.

In the second project from the course, JSTwitter, you’ll build a simple Twitter client and use it to post tweets, send direct messages, and do some interesting things like mass DM-ing and finding the last tweet from each of your friends. If you’re interested in automating Twitter, this is a good way to get started.

Finally, there has been good discussion this year about diversity in the programming community. Kirrily Robert gave a great talk at OSCON last week that had me thinking about diversity issues and motivated me to put together a diversity statement. This is a subject that is really important to me, so if you have any thoughts or comments I’d love to hear there here or over email.