And so it began, my experience in building a Rails app with the guidance of a professional. The class is definitely not for the ultimate beginner as attendees are expected to have completed the Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial. Don't give up on this tutorial if you think the first chapter , which is setting up the environment and familiarizing with GitHub, is too tedious and you just can't wait to start coding. You just need to push through the setting up stage (which is unfortunately a lengthy process) before seeing the fruits of your labor. Also, I would recommend diving straight into this tutorial rather than going through TryRuby because it is easy to lose the plot halfway through TryRuby. I got lost through the stories in poems in TryRuby. Michael Hartl has an entire chapter on Ruby itself and that would be sufficient to understand what is going on in Rails.

Lots of RSpec on the first day of the 3 hour lesson using FactoryGirl of course and setting up state machines for the app. I like the idea of using state machines to define the behavior of a class rather than toggling boolean variables which will end up really messy as it gets complex.

Our next task was to design the flow of how an email is supposed to be delivered using thread workers and integrating with a 3rd party email delivery API. It was helpful to decide how the controller should call the methods before actually writing the RSpec tests and the functions in the model. We were introduced to RSpec method stubbing which I'm still trying to get used to it.

All in all , it was a good first week of learning and I'm definitely better than I was a month ago.