Today’s episode is a My Ruby Story with Ruberto Paulo. He is going to be speaking in the Ruby Dev Summit in October. Listen to learn more about Rub!

Rob is a programmer in Cape Town, South Africa. He’s been programming in Ruby for the last 6 years. He has also been quite in different areas of business from sales, manufacturing, to teaching. He has also spoken on one of the Ruby conferences in South Africa this year. And he’s going to be speaking in Ruby Dev Summit in October.

At one stage, programming for Rob was quite a painful experience. You can get stuck in doing normal projects, eventually, you’d lose the light that you found. The talk is about Date Night with Ruby. That’s the title of the talk. It’s really about what can we do to re-ignite that fire with Ruby? We’re going to take a look at the language as if it’s a person.

Rob’s dad had a laptop that was running MS-DOS. At the time, it was navigating using a keyboard. There was no mouse. Eventually, he was teaching the whole family how to use it. His uncle also had an old Intel 80486. He set up every component and reconnected them. Eventually, the box started working. He always had this fascination with technology.

During high school, Rob used the language Delphi. He also learned Excel and Word. A couple of his friends, would spend their weekends in his friend’s garage and hack out programs. The final project for their final year, they have to bring in a project and then explain to the class its value. He and his friends used to go to internet cafes and play computer games. So, they ended up doing writing software and tutorials for these internet cafes. After 6 months of hacking up this project, the internet café used their software. Those applications became 16,000 lines long because they didn’t have the good practice that we have today.

Rob also started teaching. When he was teaching one night, a friend came up and said, “Hey, have you heard about Ruby?” That’s his journey into Ruby actually started. He said that they're looking for a couple brand new developers and if you can write two programs just to test and give them back to him on Monday, they'll see if they have a position for him. He went home and typed into Google: “How to Learn Ruby”. He found a book and read it. He did the 2 tests. The first test was the Animal Test. It was more around design. How do you create new animals if you want to do different things? It’s about inheritance. How could you give abilities to the other objects? The second one was a technical question about the relation, how to sort this array. He passed these tests and started the next Friday. That was probably around late 2010.

Rub thinks that you can make Ruby as complicated or as easy. In the most recent Ruby Weekly, there was somebody that rewrote portions of Ruby so that it can look like JavaScript. You can mold it to whatever you want. Write it as close as a natural language as you can because you’re going to be looking at a language a lot more than you’re going to be writing it. If you can pick up what’s going on in this step, that’s going to be a big leap forward. So, the big part of it is that Ruby is very natural. It reads like English. You can pick up what it’s going to be doing.