29_mastering_ruby_takes_time.txt

However, I do need to caution anyone considering adopting Rails and inherently Ruby.

It takes time to master the language. Ruby is this great discipline that makes sense from the beginning. But beginer’s eyes see Ruby in a whole different light than expert level Rubyists do.

We have been fully involved in Rails for the past three years, and only now we are really at top speed.

We have rewritten quite a few of our Rails 1.2.3 apps by now, in a completely different style. This goes beyond fat models and skinny controllers. That is just the beginning.

Even in the models, separating concerns into modules, writing at the same level of abstraction, writing one liner methods, it takes time to get it.

But once this is mastered, the applications read beautifully. And maintaining and enhancing the apps is much better now. But it tooks us three years to get here.

Remember, we started with zero knowledge in Ruby. Zero knowledge in Rails, and only academic knowledge of object oriented programming.

The team has had to do quite a bit of work. They have read a lot, I have purchased pretty much every Ruby book out there, and we all have read them. We block afternoons every couple of months and we do code reviews as a group, each of us presents a problem area we have trouble with and as a group we work on making that code read better.

I am happy with the results, but it took time to get here. Time well spent nonetheless.