All throughout my life I thought I knew what a ruby was. It is a precious gemstone, right? After all, what else could it be? This is probably still true to at least 95% of the population or maybe more. For me though, my perception of what ruby is has been altered forever. Now when I hear the word ruby, jewelry is not even on my radar. My mind immediately thinks code. Up until 2 months ago, I had never even heard of the language of Ruby or Ruby on Rails but all of the sudden it was something I needed to get familiar with ASAP.
It is no small task to learn a new programming language as anyone reading this post would know. My strategy has been to try to get a little more familiar each day using a variety of different things such as reading about the language itself, looking at the actual code used for the application at the host company and finally using katas. I have been trying to solve a kata in Java, a language that is a little more familiar, then solve the same kata with Ruby to see the differences. As I see things in the code that do not make sense, it is important to look it up and get more familiar with it. I think the most understanding will come when I am able to write an app using Ruby, which I hope to do in the next 6 months. In addition to Ruby, I have also been exposed to React for the first time, different types of databases, Postgresql and Oracle as well as tools such as Docker, Postman and Ubuntu. My mentors have helped me to understand Docker and Postman better. As for learning Ruby, I think that is going to come with time and get easier with time. I don't feel there is any way to short circuit that learning process.
What I consistently find is that for me, learning new things are extremely intimidating at first but typically never as difficult or as arduous to accomplish in reality.
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