Mixed Thoughts Newsletter: Hi Alan, Let's talk Ruby APIs tomorrow, and much more

Rich Steinmetz -

Lots of ground to cover in this very first mixed thoughts newsletter:

  • Hi Alan
  • Let's talk Ruby APIs tomorrow (7th June)
  • Magic Bootcamp student questions
  • New endeavors
  • 1 life-changer
  • React template for your portfolio website?

First things first. Let's start with a big shoutout to Alan who joined the newsletter subscriber list. He just joined the list. Nothing more, nothing less. But this triggered the creation process of this very first richstone.io mixed thoughts newsletter. So, thanks Alan, wherever you are right now. And of course a huge thanks to the other 25 subscribers here. Including my mom.

Newest endeavor: I'm becoming a father soon. The second time. I'll be a serial father so to say. Not sure if it's a major achievement but it's definitely a form of engineering and entrepreneurship that creates exciting times for me and everyone around! 🎊

Other people who are always all excited: Bootcamp students! I love that energy! That's why I make a constant effort to keep in touch with those nice folks trying to get into the industry. There's so much to learn and so many unknowns. But not just for them. I've done a few talks and workshops around Employability, Big O, and Tech Interviews Microverse and MigraCode Barcelona in the last weeks and seemingly simple questions like...

- is class << self REALLY the same as self.class in Ruby?
- what is ACTUALLY complexity in Big O?
- should I ALREADY apply for a job?

... become topics of their own worth exploring from different angles for student AND teacher 🚀

Speaking of Bootcamps, I've gone against my principles and recommended a REACT TEMPLATE to build a developer portfolio page. Basically, a TEMPLATE with REACT for a static page that's the window to your developer soul. Normally you don't need a React template for a static page. Unless... You want to learn React ;) Also, usually, you'd see Bootcamp students code their portfolio page completely themselves from scratch. This is something I would rarely recommend unless the student is really well-versed in design and/or frontend development. Every situation is different and in this case, it was a good fit to go with React AND to use a template. By the way, there are cool React templates, that make forking and changing them a great learning experience too.

Having said all that, the most important life-changer:
After almost a year of professional ruby coding, I've made ruby's multiline strings stick with a visual.

Life-changing. No more deploy blockers!


Finally, I've made good progress in creating a template for your Ruby APIs with Sinatra.rb, MongoDB, and Heroku. I'm planning to do a whole day free workshop on this, let me know if you also think it's a good use of your time to bake an API backend someday. There will be a warm-up talk about the template and other tools to create an API on Monday 7th of June (https://www.meetup.com/ruby-and-rails-developers-barcelona/events/278355139/).

As always, I'd love to hear from you via archaic text channels, novel in-person meetings, or online gatherings.