I am working through this Rails Series on Coursera to get a more structured exposure to the rails ecosystem. I find that I learn best when I have a school like structure, so even though I have been fiddling around with Rails for quite some time now I am hoping that this series will teach me some good patterns for the future.

So far I have been super impressed. First, I had no idea that Johns Hopkins even had a Computer Science department. Second, watching the introductory video on this series made me envy the students in that program. I finished my MS in Computer Science at NOVA Southeastern University last year and although I would highly recommend this program for anyone who wants to learn the intricacies of CS, it is not the best program to prepare you for a programming job. This is not that programs fault but instead a general problem with CS education. Most programs are about 10 years behind in terms of trends, tooling, and practices. However, based on the course intro which was given by the faculty of JHU I feel like they “get it”. I am sure that the JHU program is not that much different as far as core content, but the fact that they give their students exposure to real world practices (rails, mongo, git, etc) is inspiring.

I am looking forward to working through this course and becoming a jr rails developer. I hope to apply these skills directly to this project that I started two months ago and have not touched since. Opendesk is an ambitious project to make a support center that does not rely on tags to accomplish anything outside of the “norm”. Hopefully by the end of this series I will have enough knowledge and skills to push this project over the edge and make an actual release.

One immediate benefit of this course is that I learned that Pro Git is actually available as a free ebook. This is an awesome resource that really digs into the intricacies of git. I would consider myself an intermediate git user, but there is always room to learn more.