Learning Rails 5

Foreword

I came to Rails in 2010. At the time I was doing contract work as a QA engineer in Raleigh, NC. Previous to this I was an out of work software tester. After following my wife to Asheville, NC for a university teaching position I decided I wanted to move from software testing to development work. Asheville is a small market and finding work was tough, so Raleigh was one of my only options. At the time Rails was at version 2.x. Though I was only testing, not developing Rails apps, the learning curve was steep. The process of putting all the pieces of a Rails App in place (GIT, Bundler, Gems, Gemfiles, RVM) was daunting to say the least. “Drinking from a fire hose” was the term we used. I was living and working in Raleigh during the week, and going home to be with my wife on the weekend. This living arrangement gave me lots of time to explore this new framework. I wrote test scripts during the day, and spent my evenings working through Rails tutorials. I owe a debt of gratitude to many of the engineers I worked with on the Entitlement Services team at Red Hat. Specifically, Brenton Leanhardt for his patience and mentoring in learning Ruby and Linux. At the time Rails was only about 5 years old and there were still questions of whether or not Rails was enterprise ready. Those questions have since fallen by the wayside, and Rails is now considered a full-fledged enterprise development platform. Rails is no longer a second-class citizen to Java or PHP, and is arguably at the ...