What was YOUR first Ruby Project

[Eric Hegwer]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

For me, Ruby is my entrance to the world of programming. My first and
only computer class was as a HS sophomore in 1986.

And as for my first project, I'm fighting my way through a fourm
tutorial written for 1.6 (I'm riding 2.02).

 

[David A. Black]

Hi --

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

I think my first non-tiny Ruby program was an implementation of the
word game Jotto. This would have been in November 2000; I had just
discovered Ruby, via the newly-published pickaxe, early that month.

For me, Ruby is my entrance to the world of programming. My first and
only computer class was as a HS sophomore in 1986.

And as for my first project, I'm fighting my way through a fourm
tutorial written for 1.6 (I'm riding 2.02).

I can't quite map those version numbers consistently to either Ruby or
Rails, but would I be right in guessing that your project is a Rails
project?


David

 

[Eric Hegwer]

I can't quite map those version numbers consistently to either Ruby or
Rails, but would I be right in guessing that your project is a Rails
project?

You are, sir. What would be the correct syntax?

 

[David A. Black]

Hi --

You are, sir. What would be the correct syntax?

There never was a Rails 1.6 (though there was a Ruby 1.6.x, for
several values of x I think you mean Rails 1.2.6 and 2.0.2.
In both cases you're probably using Ruby 1.8.6, I'd guess.



David

 

[Bryan Richardson]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

My first adventure with Ruby was with a passive network mapping tool I did
for work. Another gentleman at work had started creating the tool using
Ruby, so when I began working on it I just continued on with what he had. I
come from a Java background so I considered porting it, but Java seemed too
*clunky* for such a tool. I have to say I've fallen in love with writing
Ruby code... after starting this project at work I ported all my
just-for-fun web applications from PHP to Rails, which made them even more
fun!

 

[Dido Sevilla]

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[Michael Fellinger]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

My first encounter with ruby was on a sailing boat cruise along the
coast of croatia, I had my trusty old notebook with me and it was
running gentoo, we used it for music and videos but only had power
when the generator was running (around 3-4h a day) at which time i
recharged.
To get most out of the notebook i decided to take advantage of the
multimedia buttons on the outside, but had no idea how that could be
done. I mostly knew PHP back then, but had heard of python and ruby
and installed some docs and the interpreters, part of the docs was the
old copy of the pickaxe, and while the python docs more or less
freaked me out with their spacey code i found the ruby one very much
read/understandable and started reading about IO, finally found that
when i cat /proc/acpi/events i would get the key codes for the
multimedia buttons and finally wrote a script (must've been 200 lines
or so) of overly complicated if/else statements that hooked onto a
simple Ipen/read. for controlling the actual multimedia i used
xmmsctrl.
Ruby version must've been something like 1.8.2.
Didn't do anything else with Ruby for another year after this, but got
poked by the hype around rails and subsequently learned Nitro.

^ manveru

 

[ara.t.howard]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

For me, Ruby is my entrance to the world of programming. My first and
only computer class was as a HS sophomore in 1986.

And as for my first project, I'm fighting my way through a fourm
tutorial written for 1.6 (I'm riding 2.02).

the first thing that would qualify as a project was:

http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/btpgsql/btpgsql-0.2.4/doc/

i can't imagine having done it in perl ;-)

a @ http://codeforpeople.com/

 

[Peter Szinek]

Hi,

My first longer-than-5-lines of code was scRUBYt! - probably the most
popular Ruby web scraping framework to date (based on gem D/L count).
It's an awesome example of how much can be done with Ruby even if you
are a beginner - I was a full-time Java coder and a hobby Python
programmer back then, and my Ruby knowledge was very minimal
(unfortunately some parts of the code still reflect this :-D though
the more important chunks were refactored since then).

Cheers,
Peter

 

[Marc Heiler]

Hi,

I actually can not remember which was my first real ruby script.
Maybe I removed it already.

One script I wrote rather early was one that helped me to colourize
output (by using many gsub's) and reformatted slightly.

My biggest project so far is the one that I plan to release one
day ("Ruby Build Tools") after all known bugs are fixed.
I think I use it since 4 years by now, it however has only
7800 lines of code, and that includes comments and empty lines too

I guess it is rather hard to write a lot of lines in ruby "normally".

The first ruby code I wrote was probably from a tutorial like chris pine
tutorial or that other tutorial with the "dragon"... think it was

dragon.eat or dragon.breathe something

 

[Jayson Williams]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

For me, Ruby is my entrance to the world of programming. My first and
only computer class was as a HS sophomore in 1986.

And as for my first project, I'm fighting my way through a fourm
tutorial written for 1.6 (I'm riding 2.02).

My first Ruby project was at work. I was given the responsibility of
manually searching for error messages that were scattered through a
these huge 30M XML documents. The only method in use at the time was
to open the XML document in word, and try to eyeball where the errors
were. It was a ridiculous way to search for errors, that took hours,
and was never better than 50% accurate. A horrible way to blow a
Monday morning. I had gone through the online Ruby tutorial on
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ and was blown away. Hmm... Could ruby be
a better solution. After a few weeks of tinkering, I was able to put
together a script that reduced hours of drudgery to almost instant
results, and from less than 50% accuracy to 100% accuracy.
Waaahoooaaaa. I later bundled the script into an .exe with
rubyscript2exe, and passed the responsibility for finding the errors
to the people I was reporting to. They loved the application, and the
fact that they could get results almost instantly. I have been a fan
ever since. I have even been able to have the company agree to add
Ruby to their authorized development languages. Very nice! I am now 1
of 1 Ruby developers for the company.

~Jay

 

[Lloyd Linklater]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

I have written many snippets and fell in love with the language but I
have been absolutely unsuccessful at writing a usable program. I write
programs in Delphi and more recently in Java, but I always have a UI to
work with in one form or another (no pun intended). Putting Ruby
snippets together into something usable has turned out to be impossible
for me. I am clearly missing something visceral but there it is. As
much as I adore the fabulous language, to that extent I am disappointed
that I cannot use it for anything. Very sad but there it is.

 

[F. Senault]

Le 14 juin à 13:45, Eric Hegwer a écrit :

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

A bit of both, actually. I came into contact with the language through
the use of the package upgrading tool of my server operating system of
choice (tm). Since it required Ruby, a bit of curiosity led me to some
quick google searches and...

For the first serious project I wrote, I believe it is a set of tools
used to collect data and graph them using RRDtools, and a lot of small
system utilities in that vein.

I've never quite finished any big projects with Ruby, though, but I'm
pushing the language to my coworkers with a few presentations...

Fred

 

[Damjan Rems]

Mine was writing schedule calendar for BackupExec backup software. I am
changing tapes every week (3 sets) and am doing mounthly backup on last
working day of month. Basicly I had to write text output file which
contains lines SCHED_INCLUDEDATE=mm/dd/yyyy for 4 different schedule
schemes.

I had tried PHP before and it was dull. Program contained more than 200
lines in PHP. And it has only around 50 lines in Ruby.

It was an instant love afair and I am using Ruby for all my programming
needs since then.

by
TheR

 

[Leslie Viljoen]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

For me, Ruby is my entrance to the world of programming. My first and
only computer class was as a HS sophomore in 1986.

And as for my first project, I'm fighting my way through a fourm
tutorial written for 1.6 (I'm riding 2.02).

My first Ruby was a Rails project to show system status, similar to Webmin.
I wanted to do the project in Perl/Mason and my boss insisted on PHP, so I did
a detailed comparison of the languages and ended up choosing Ruby!

Then I spent some time replacing every Perl script I had ever written with Ruby.
Hundreds of lines of ugly became a few lines of beautiful. Now I just see Perl
as an opportunity to write some Ruby.

Les

 

[Bob Hutchison]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

My first project in Ruby was in 2002 and involved writing an XML pull
parser (<http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampl-pp/>). I had been
watching Ruby for quite a while and never did anything much with it
beyond convincing myself that I liked it. If I was to do anything with
Ruby I would need to have a decent way to parse XML files. At the time
REXML was slow, and maybe a little buggy, and most importantly didn't
support namespaces in its SAX-like parser. I should probably package
it up as a gem and get it on rubyforge. There haven't been a lot of
bug fixes (maybe 2) since I released it, and certainly no features
added (why? how often does XML change?). I optimised it as best I
could, so it isn't particularly readable code. Worse, it was written
for Ruby 1.6.x (or earlier??) and in that generation of Ruby iterating
using blocks was horribly slow, so it isn't particularly idiomatic
Ruby either. I did learn a lot about Ruby though

Cheers,
Bob

 

[Dave Bass]

Translating an existing Java program of mine into Ruby. The Ruby version
is *much* nicer (and half the length)!

Dave

 

[Kyle Schmitt]

My first ruby project was my first experience with it.
It was a large suite of tests written with the WATiR library. It
pretty quickly became monstrous, but was a wonderful learning
playground, as well as actually doing it's job, and doing it on time.
By the second project, a second suite of tests for a different web
app, it was code I could somewhat be proud of, and was really easy to
follow. At least for me.

--Kyle

 

[Simon Blanco]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

For me, Ruby is my entrance to the world of programming. My first and
only computer class was as a HS sophomore in 1986.

And as for my first project, I'm fighting my way through a fourm
tutorial written for 1.6 (I'm riding 2.02).

I've been learning programming these last 2 years, mostly C and C#, and
now I'm getting into this ruby language.
Maybe I'm a little unexperienced to realize all the power that ruby has,
but for now I can see many cool things on it.

So now I'm re-writing lots of my old C scripts, and I'd consider that my
first work in ruby "by myself"

I've been enjoying the Why's great tutorial until now, and some other
sample projects, also gave Hackety Hack a try and learnt some concepts
having a great time.

Just curiosity, wich tutorial are you fighting your way through?

 

[Pokkai Dokkai]

I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough) side project that you
decided to take on?

i was started ruby at JUN-2007 as a ROR Project
my Project is related with Hospital Management Information System(HMIS)
in Health Care .

it is mainly focused with ActiveRecord & ActionPack modules