Ruby Rogues

Our original panel podcast, Ruby Rogues is a weekly discussion around Ruby, Rails, software development, and the community around Ruby.

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227 RR Rails Composer, RailsApps and Tutorials with Daniel Kehoe

Guests :

Daniel Kehoe

Hosts :

Published : Sep 30, 2015

Duration : 41 Minutes

Show Notes

Check out Rails Remote Conf! Submit a CFP!

01:53 - Daniel Kehoe Introduction

02:07 - Digital Nomad Lifestyle

08:45 - RailsApps & Rails Tutorials

22:42 - rails-composer for Beginner Programmers

Remember to go check out Daniel's Kickstarter Project: Rails Composer with Rails Tutorials!

Picks

remote | ok (Saron)
Rails Remote Conf (Chuck)
weworkremotely.com (Chuck)
Slack (Chuck)
Screenhero (Chuck)
Pinegrow Web Editor (Daniel)
Nomad List (Daniel)
Low Yat Plaza (Daniel)

Special Guest: Daniel Kehoe.

Transcript

[This episode is sponsored by Hired.com. Every week on Hired, they run an auction where over a thousand tech companies in San Francisco, New York, and L.A. bid on Ruby developers, providing them with salary and equity upfront. The average Ruby developer gets an average of 5 to 15 introductory offers and an average salary offer of $130,000 a year. Users can either accept an offer and go right into interviewing with the company or deny them without any continuing obligations. It’s totally free for users. And when you’re hired, they give you a $2,000 signing bonus as a thank you for using them. But if you use the Ruby Rogues link, you’ll get a $4,000 bonus instead. Finally, if you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus if they accept the job. Go sign up at Hired.com/RubyRogues.]

[Snap is a hosted CI and continuous delivery that is simple and intuitive. Snap’s deployment pipelines deliver fast feedback and can push healthy builds to multiple environments automatically or on demand. Snap integrates deeply with GitHub and has great support for different languages, data stores, and testing frameworks. Snap deploys your application to cloud services like Heroku, Digital Ocean, AWS, and many more. Try Snap for free. Sign up at SnapCI.com/RubyRogues.]

[This episode is sponsored by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is the provider I use to host all of my creations. All the shows are hosted there along with any other projects I come up with. Their user interface is simple and easy to use. Their support is excellent and their VPS’s are backed on Solid State Drives and are fast and responsive. Check them out at DigitalOcean.com. If you use the code RubyRogues, you’ll get a $10 credit.]

CHUCK:

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 227 of the Ruby Rogues Podcast. This week on our panel, we have Saron Yitbarek.

SARON:

Hey everybody.

CHUCK:

I'm Charles Max Wood from Rails Remote Conf. Go check that out, RailsRemoteConf.com. We also have a special guest this week, and that is Daniel Kehoe.

DANIEL:

Hey, this is Daniel. I'm checking in from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And it’s about midnight right now here in KL.

CHUCK:

Wow!

SARON:

Wow!

CHUCK:

You want to talk briefly about your Digital Nomad Lifestyle before we get into some of the other things we’re going to talk about?

DANIEL:

Yeah. I wrote a blog post about it recently on RailsApps blog. I titled the blog ‘I Left My Heart in

San Francisco’. Working on the open source project is my full time gig, working on RailsApps. And

I came to a point at the end of last year 2014, where I had to make a decision either I get a full time job working for somebody else to pay the rents in San Francisco with the rising cost of living or I started travelling looking for a cheap place to live and keep the open source project going. So, it was something of a dilemma to face. I love San Francisco but I've been travelling since the end of December 2014. I've spent three months in Cape Town, South Africa – awesome place. I spent two months in Indonesia both in Bandung and in Bali. I've spent a month in the Philippines, in Manila. And I'm currently in Malaysia. I'm here for almost two months.

The project is find the best place in the world where I can live and work on my open source project and it’s been an adventure.

SARON:

How do you pick the places you go?

DANIEL:

Oh, it’s kind of – that’s going to be my pick actually at the end of the show which is NomadList.io. But in addition to that which is a great listing of all the places that you might find digital nomads, places where people might go where they’ll find the communities of people working remotely. It’s just word of mouth with colleagues and friends and my own curiosity that drove me to South Africa and the fact that there was a strong vibrant Ruby/Rails community. They are the people who asked me to come in and teach because I do weekend workshops introducing Ruby on Rails to beginners.

So yeah, it’s been kind of hit or miss looking for places where cost of living is low but the amenities are good, Internet is fast. And I haven’t found any place quite as much as I like San Francisco. But I'm still looking – Thailand, Chiang Mai maybe next on the list. Nanchang and Da Lat in Vietnam are on my list to check out. I'm open to suggestions from any listeners who have suggestions about where is a great place to live and work as a digital nomad. I’d love to hear it, @DanielKehoe.

CHUCK:

I was just going to say it. It reminds of something that Alondo Brewington on the iPhreaks Show pointed out. He actually applied, I don’t remember if he got in or not, it sounded like he did. But it’s Remote Year and they travel to a different country every month. And so, they're in South America the first four months of the year up to next four months and then Asia the next four months. One of the cities on there is Kuala Lumpur but they also go to Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Turkey, Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

SARON:

Wow!

CHUCK:

If I weren’t married and would have to take six other people with me, I would be severely tempted to do this.

DANIEL:

It’s a worthy option. I think people are beginning to realize that it’s possible to make a life not necessarily tied to one place geographically or for having some flexibility in your life. And the most interesting thing to me is to discover the picture for me of the digital nomad and there's always something of a stereotype. It was always probably typically a guy on a beach in Thailand with a laptop and maybe working doing contract work or something like that and living kind of a backpacker [inaudible] kind of life.

And I've actually found some of my colleagues who are in midlife, I guess, and couples and even families who have taken up this Digital Nomad Lifestyle. So, it’s definitely an option and it is a

remarkable way to live.

CHUCK:

I think the temptation for me would be during the summer when my kids are out of school. I like having some stability when they're in school but June, July, August just go and…

SARON:

Why not?

CHUCK:

Go work and live in some other country.

SARON:

Is this a permanent lifestyle change for you or is this something you're going to do for maybe another year but then you'll come back home in San Francisco?

DANIEL:

If I come back to San Francisco, I don’t think I can work on the open source project. San Francisco has just gotten so expensive and this is a real disappointment for me because I love the Bay Area. But I was able to work on this open source project because I had cheap rent out in the Sunset District and that living situation ended and I faced the prospect of having to compete with people for very few vacancies and pain [inaudible] of $2000/$3000 a month for a small apartment. And my income is completely from people who support the open source project who read the RailsApps Tutorials, Capstone Rails Tutorials and my book for beginners ‘Learn Ruby on Rails’.

There's no corporate sponsorship for the project I work on and it’s my full time gig. I don’t do consulting. So, I have to keep my expenses low. Sad to say, it wasn’t really possible in San Francisco anymore. And in fact, it didn’t make sense to stay in the US. It made sense to look elsewhere. So, I'm on the road till I find a better place to settle permanently.

SARON:

I'm wondering how your friends, family, community reacted to that. Were they supportive? Were they like, “What do you think you're doing? You have to be here.” What was their reaction like?

DANIEL:

It was definitely disruptive but I actually think I've got more friends now since I've been travelling than I have in San Francisco. San Francisco, it was easy to get together in person but it’s still – everybody’s schedule was so busy. Yeah, it wasn’t always easy to get together with people in person but since I've been in different cities making connections with new people, this social media thing has widened my circle of friends because I'm using WhatsApp and WeChat and passively messaging people and friends in Beijing, friends in South Africa, friends in Indonesia, all new friends. And I don’t feel lonely. I think I'm very, very connected with lots of people around the world.

I have a son who’s in college in Boston, so I'm staying in touch with him, of course. And yeah, there's always Facebook to my friends back from San Francisco.

CHUCK:

I think we have talked about this for the whole time. But I want to get into what the actual project is. So, can you give us a brief overview of what RailsApps is?

DANIEL:

I started RailsApps about four or five years ago. I was doing management-level consulting work and I go off on an assignment with a client and then I’d come back and I’d want to work on my own Rails projects. This was around 2006 to 2008. Rails, of course, changes so fast every six months or so at least, and I’d be catching up. I started writing, putting together basically RailsApps and then I was writing tutorials to go along with them. I used to be a Tech Journalist. I wrote for PCWorld Magazine years ago, back when it was printed on paper and was as thick as a telephone book with ads for graphic cards and things like that. So, tech writing is a first love of mine.

Tutorial is really popular around the end of 2012, beginning of 2013. I was looking for a way to do the tutorials and the example applications full time as an open source project and it was sort of confounded by the challenge of ‘how do you work on open source full time without a job, without a subsidy from corporate sponsors or without doing consulting on the side’. And because I really believe so many open source projects are jeopardized by [inaudible] burnout and budget cuts. When people work on open source in their spare time, it’s often hard for the project to be sustained. So it’s wanting to experiment and find ways to support an open source project.

And the thing that I stumbled upon was that people don’t like to pay for open source, even contributions. I think because people kind of view most software projects as ‘I could write it myself if I only had time, so why should I pay for it’. But of course, we still all use it and we still want to use it. But people will pay for documentation, people somehow value the documentation that goes along with a software project. And I was able to [inaudible] a subscription model where I was writing tutorials or the example applications that I was putting together and people were willing to pay $19 a month which is very gratifying. It was enough for me to make a full time commitment to the project.

And the project is at the core example applications. There are a dozen starter applications that you might use for any Rails project that you're starting on, typically frontend framework like bootstrap or foundation plus authentication with devise or omniauth, some sort of form of authorization, either using a gem like Pundit or a simple role-based authorization. And then advance features like [inaudible] on the web.

So these example applications, they save time and they avoid the duplication of effort of every developer who wants to fire up a new project, spending an hour or two putting together the basic set of gems they always want to use. It becomes a reference implementation so that if Rails has changed since the last time you started a new project and you're not quite sure what the current best practice is or how your favorite gems are currently integrated, you can go to the RailsApps GitHub account and find a repo that’s got a working, functioning, up-to-date, maintained example application that shows how to put together, for example, bootstrap with the right flash messages, devise with extra features like maybe give a name for a user as well as an email, options to use Haml instead of ERB, the current configuration of RSpec so that you don’t have to scratch your head trying to remember what the current configuration file should be for RSpec. And it’s become quite popular. You'll be surprised at how many people I run into at a conference and saying, “Oh yeah. Rails Composer, I use that all the time whenever I need to start up a project.”

CHUCK:

Yeah, somebody should make a video about it.

DANIEL:

Fortunately [laughs] [crosstalk]. I've heard of an excellent video, it’s from RailsClips. I got that right?

CHUCK:

Yeah, that guy.

DANIEL:

[Laughs]

CHUCK:

Okay, okay. I'm that guy.

DANIEL:

I'm glad you did that, Chuck, because I've been thinking for a long time, “Really we should make a video. People are always asking me ‘what are the options and what are the choices when you fire up Rails Composer and what are the options and why should I use it’.” Hey, you did the work and I've got a link right on the Read Me page for Rails Composer. You know there's a really nice introduction [voice trailing off].

CHUCK:

I really like, with what you're doing, a couple of things. One is that I think there are a lot of tutorials out there that are just, “Okay, we’re going to get started with a toy app and we’re going to add toy feature to toy app.” People, I think, lose interest in a lot of cases because there's not anything that they're ever going to use or show off to anybody. And so, if you have something to walk through that says, “You're going to have something that looks like this at the end,” and the RailsApps examples are things that people are going to actually want in some cases. So, they want a

subscription site or they want, I don’t remember what they're allowed, but there are all things that people are going to, at least at some basic level, want even if it’s not exactly what they want. They can build it out and then they can tweak it to be what they want.

So first off, I just wanted to point that out. I mean, the tutorials are well-explained. And they are applications that are, in my opinion, better than toy apps because they're actually useful.

DANIEL:

Because they tie together, the whole project ties together. There's the example applications which serve as reference and the implementations of basic integrations of authentication, authorization, frontend frameworks, testing. And there's Rails Composer which can generate any of those example applications.

I just want to tell everybody because some people get confused, Rails Composer is free to use, it’s open source. The example applications [inaudible] GitHub repos, they're free to use. The only aspect of the project that could cause any money and it’s completely voluntary is if you want to purchase the tutorials.

So when you purchase the tutorials, every line of code and those all example applications generated by Rails Composer is explained in the dozen tutorials. So the dozen tutorials, when somebody purchases those tutorials and supports the project, that’s an interesting model for this open source project is how the tutorials support the open source project. It saves time, reduces [inaudible].

I would really like to think of it as that concept is there is nothing that Rails Composer does or the example applications do that’s particularly hard. It’s all the common easy stuff that we do in the first hour or two of building a Rails application. But why spend that first hour to building the same thing that not only you’ve built maybe half a dozen times before but every other developer has built before? So, it just eliminates that [inaudible] of, “Oh, yeah. How is it that I integrate bootstrap? How is it that I set up devise and RSpec together?” It just eliminates that so you can focus immediately on the value added by the application focusing neatly on what are the features that make your minimal viable product. That, I think, is why our Rails Composer has been so popular.

CHUCK:

How do you decide which examples to build out for RailsApps?

DANIEL:

I started building from the most basic and I have continued to add complexities. So, I look at the kind of applications I would be building for a typical project. It kind of makes sense that there is a priority of simple to complex. The simplest thing to be, just basic integration of a frontend framework type bootstrap or foundation and then adding in devise. And then another level of complexity, typically you're going to [inaudible] some sort of authorization so you can separate addon features, add-on pages from user-facing pages or maybe different kinds of users like user personas. So the applications have kind of built.

I went on another in complexity with the most complex one so far being ones that integrate Stripe for payment. And I'm open to hearing from anybody, what are the applications that I've missed? What is a generic application? Or something like maybe social network or any comments to a blog or something like that might be something to tackle next.

CHUCK:

Yeah, I've built my fair share of social networks. [Laughs] But they're definitely, I think, different classes of applications that people build. And even if you haven’t built a tutorial around that class or type of application, in a lot of cases, you are covering, like you said before, all of the different parts that have to work together to make it work. So you got your authentication, you got Stripe, you’ve got roles, you’ve got maybe bootstrap or foundation, and all of these things. Hooking them up is just something that takes time. It doesn’t take a lot of mental work. Yeah, Rails Composer is nice just to pull those in and have [inaudible] hooked up to start with.

DANIEL:

The feature that I'm adding next to Rails Composer is actually – I'm running a Kickstarter campaign to add – I think it’s going to be really popular. When Rails Composer generates a basic starter application right now, it’s just a simple home page that’s just got a navigation bar, lets you sign in/sign out with [inaudible]. That’s about all that’s there. And I found that I was doing a lot of work to download some bootstrap theme and then try to integrate that within the starter application [inaudible]. It looks like, “Wait a second, Rails Coposer should be doing this.”

So I'm starting a Kickstarter campaign right now. And I think I've got 15 days. I don’t know when the podcast goes out. But this is going to be running until October 6th. So if anybody wants to help out, help the open source campaign, open source project with the Kickstarter campaign, you’ve got until October 6th to check it out. And this is going to be adding over 20 bootstrap layouts to Rails Composer so that when you generate a starter application, you’ve got your pick like a blog-oriented homepage or you’ve got a small business-oriented homepage or you’ve got like a gallery homepage that might be useful for a photographer or a catalogue.

And it’s all the kinds of bootstrap things that you might be searching for on the web. They are all coming from a project called Start Bootstrap, StartBootstrap.com, some people may be familiar with. It’s a design house that’s been producing these pretty bootstrap themes and they're great. I often turn to them, now I'm just going to incorporate them in Rails Composer. It looks like we’re going to meet the final goals for the Kickstarter campaign. I've got [inaudible]. I hope people will check out Kickstarter campaign. There's a video that explains Rails Composer and the features that were going to be added.

When [inaudible] started Kickstarter campaign is that since Kickstarter is kind of a give-somethingget-something kind of deal, I'm offering all the tutorials that I've written plus great learning resources for Rails from other people including RailsClips from Charles Max Wood. There's a one month free membership of that.

CHUCK:

Two months, two months free. I mean, I'm happy to support projects like this. The thing is that if I give away two months of RailsClips, I'm ensured that does cost me money if there are people that would have subscribed anyway. But it’s not something that I'm going to necessarily miss. And it’s a great way to support projects like this. I'm sure that the other contributors go Rails [inaudible] and all these other guys. It’s the same thing. It’s like, “Hey, we’re happy to contribute to the project. We’re happy to help raise awareness of it.” And it’s a great resource. I mean, I think a lot of people benefit from having something like Rails Composer in the community where maybe it saves you half hour, maybe it saves you an hour, but it’s still something that, for me, is something that I don’t necessarily want to do myself just because it’s not something that’s really that interesting.

DANIEL:

It’s an awesome community. I was particularly gratified two or three days ago. Michael Hartl who, of course, got the Rails Tutorial Book in organization – that’s very, very well-known; it’s a book that’s recommended for learning Rails – actually did me a huge favor. He’s got a new book coming out. It’s called ‘Learn Enough Command Line To Be Dangerous’. It’s a new series that he’s producing. And he did a posting on his blog about his new book and [inaudible]. So go check out Daniel, check out the advanced tutorials that he’s made available.

It was super gratifying for me to have somebody like Michael Hartl making recommendation of my tutorials because people look at his book and my book ‘Learn Ruby on Rails’ which is on Amazon and they're like, “Oh, those guys must be competing.” You know, two different authors, writing books to learn Rails. And in fact, we’re really supportive of different approaches and all serving particularly the needs of people who are getting into Rails for the first time.

People are always asking me, “What’s the difference between Michael Hartl’s book and your book, Daniel?”

SARON:

That’s great, to see that [inaudible] is awesome. One thing I'm digging about is Rails Composer for an experienced developer. As Chuck said, doing things that you don’t really want to, you're not excited about doing but you have to do. Rails Composer seems such a great tool for that. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how it fits into the learning process for a more beginner person, someone who’s really new to Rails and one who maybe doesn’t fully understand how things work. Is Rails Composer, is it better to use something like that once you have an understanding and it’s more of a shortcut to do the things that you know how to do but you don’t want to do? Or do you see it as a good introduction to the Rails system for someone who’s a beginner?

DANIEL:

If I'm right, you were at Flatiron School.

SARON:

Yes, I was.

DANIEL:

I knew that. It’s interesting because I've had this discussion with Avi Flombaum who runs Flatiron School who is somebody I totally admire and somebody who is a teacher in the community. He’s been really supportive of tutorials I've written. In fact, he’s adopted them as a supplementary material for a student at Flatiron School. We’ve also talked about Rails Composer. And my initial take on Rails Composer was that, “Oh, my God! Don’t tell beginners, don’t tell students about Rails Composer because they’ll just take the shortcut and immediately generate this app and not know anything about Rails and then jump in and attempt to use it.” And I think that’s kind of the immediate response of most developers if they heard about Rails Composer and how quickly it can generate the Rails application. That would be dangerous for Rails learner to know about this.

I recently, actually – people have shared a different perspective for me which is that if you use something like Rails Composer to show you how it should be done and that’s where the tutorials fit in, because the tutorials actually explain every line of code that’s in the applications generated by Rails Composer. So if you're a beginner and I think yes, you should at least have dived the [inaudible] into learning Rails before you attempt to use Rails Composer.

But it’s not the end of the world if you get to a point where you're totally frustrated trying to build your first application. You spending an hour or more spinning your wheels on something trying to figure it out. And then you just want to see your reference implementation about like ‘show me code that works’. Show me code that is known to work that I've naturally ran and see the feature working and then let me take it apart. Let me dig into it, investigate, see how it’s put together so I've got a good working example of something that I'm looking at like authentication with devise or authorization with roles or just something as simple as integrating a frontend framework like bootstrap. I think that’s the place it has for a beginner. I don’t think anybody realistically is going to think that they're a [inaudible] developer just because they can fire up this tool and generate an application in a few minutes. It’s a good learning tool potentially especially coupled with the tutorials.

SARON:

I loved that idea of using it as a reference because a lot of times, even now, I’ll go back to just older things that I've used as a reference. And so to be able to have a set number of applications that with tutorials, can explain exactly what's going on, I think is a really fantastic idea. I’m wondering how the tutorials fit in.

One of the very common pain points that I've heard in the Code Newbie community is that people who want to learn to code will do tutorials or read books and the tutorials will give them a very definitive step-by-step breakdown of this is the button you push, this is the command you run to do the thing you want to do. And so they end with an app that works that’s really functional but they don’t necessarily know how it works or what things they could have changed. They were not able to really understand the nuances of what they just built. I'm wondering how does Rails Composer and your book and the tutorials, how do they help people really know what they're doing beyond just ending up with an application they’ve wanted.

DANIEL:

That’s a particular challenge, it’s a challenge for most tutorials even most coding boot camps, people reach that point that they call the junior gap where you can follow somebody’s recipe but can you really create something from scratch yourself. I think there's a particular approach to teaching that makes it easier to overcome that gap. And that’s what I tried to do in my book which is not just to provide. The books that I've written ‘Learn Ruby on Rails’ book which is on Amazon, you can check it out. I'm looking at a lot of five star reviews for it. So I think I'm doing the right thing with it.

SARON:

[Chuckles]

DANIEL:

It is specifically aimed at absolute beginners unlike Michael Hartl’s book which most of us learned Rails from because we’ve already had a background as developers using PHP or doing development in Java about patience already programmers. This book ‘Learn Ruby on Rails’ has got a fluffy cat on the cover just to show people that it’s not going to be intimidating. It gives a context and a background and it gives formulas and strategies for learning and solving problems that you won't get in a typical cookie-cutter recipe tutorial.

I tell people it’s really two books in one. It’s a step-by-step tutorial so you can do the real Rails application. But it’s also a self-help book because it addresses questions like Rails challenges. What makes Rails hard to learn? What are the stumbling blocks? What are the challenges that you're going to encounter as s developer? And some of those challenges are technology-specific like it’s hard to develop/learn Rails if you’ve got a Windows computer – very specific. And some of them are more psychological. What is it when you don’t have role models who look like you? That is a particular challenge for people learning programming. And it is far more psychological and sociological than technical.

So the book attempts to address a range of issues and provide a range of strategies so that people actually feel prepared. Ultimately, you have to do the work, you have to start building applications, you have to build a number of applications, and you have to struggle through them. And it’s the resources you have as you struggle through with building your applications to determine how quickly you're going to become a skilled developer. At least that’s what I believe and what I've seen in my teaching.

CHUCK:

One thing I want to jump back to real quick was the question about Rails Composer for newbies. I did find that when I was setting it up, that when I ran through all the options at the end, it didn’t explain to me very well where to go to set all the configuration options. I mean, I knew kind of where to go because I was experienced, so I just went and did it. But I could see that as something they run into but the flipside is that a lot of times, the newbies don’t want to – and I'm kind of the same way to a certain degree – I don’t want to struggle through ‘how do I set all this crap up’. I

want to build something interesting and so I do like that it does provide that shortcut and then they can go back and figure out how those pieces work later if they can get the configuration working.

DANIEL:

There are two main options for Rails Composer. And I think in your video introduction, you went through the custom application approach which is what most of the experienced developers are using. A friend of mine who was a consultant and also a digital nomad, he left South Africa with his wife and he’s now travelling I think here in the Philippines right now. And we were in the same hotel a few weeks ago and he was saying, “Hey Daniel, the Rails Composer. Yeah, that’s a great tool.” He said, “It’s been a couple of months since I last had to build a Rails application so I tried to check out that thing that you do.” So I'm like, “Okay, cool.” He said, “Yeah, I fired the thing up, Rails Composer, I was able to [inaudible] through, I was able to pick Haml instead of ERB. I picked RSpec, install simple form. I decided to disable turbo links for that project because I hate turbo links because it messes with my Javascript.” I said, “Okay. Did you build one of the RailsApps example applications, the ones that are built into Rails Composer?” He said, “No, no, no. I just want that custom app and I picked all those options.”

So most experienced developers tend to just go through that list of custom apps because they know what the options are, they know the difference between Haml, ERB, and Slim. They know the difference between picking devise versus omniauth, they know the difference between implementing simple role-based authorization or Pundit. But a beginner would just look at that list of options and be completely confounded and hopefully start googling what all those things are and learn what all the basic gems are that most developers use.

But there is another choice for that newbie. And also for the developer who is comfortable with the [inaudible] menu which is you can build any of example applications that are in the RailsApps repo, the ones that have the tutorials to go along with them. That’s an option in Rails Composer. There's a dozen of the RailsApps starter apps, the pre-built ones that match the ones in the repos exactly.

So for a beginner who isn’t sure whether they should pick ERB or Haml, it makes those choices for them and then they can refer to the tutorials, that is if they choose to support the project by purchasing the tutorials. I don’t want to imply that tutorials are free for everybody because they're not. That’s what supports the project. But all the codes are explained in the tutorials if they pick one of the basic starter applications.

CHUCK:

Okay, gotcha.

DANIEL:

Yeah, you were the guy who went the hard route and picked the custom applications.

CHUCK:

[Chuckles] I always do things the hard way. Alrighty, I know that we’re up against some hard timeline. So I'm going to go ahead and push us into the picks.

Before we get to picks, I want to take some time to thank our silver sponsor.

[This episode is sponsored by Code School. Code School is an online learning destination for existing and aspiring developers that teaches through entertaining content. They provide immersive video lessons with inbrowser challenges which means that each course has a unique theme and storyline and feels much more like a game. Whether you've been programming for a long time or have only just begun, Code School has something for everyone. You can master Ruby on Rails or JavaScript as well as Git, HTML, CSS, and iOS. And more than a million people around the world use Code School to improve their development skills by learning or doing. You can find more information at CodeSchool.com/RubyRogues.]

CHUCK:

Saron, what are your picks?

SARON:

Sure. I think we’re kind of thinking of the same thing in our pick section because I was going to do the nomad thing as well.

DANIEL:

No kidding.

SARON:

Yeah, the whole nomadic concept. I really like that. So one that I'm going to do, hopefully you're not going to do this one, is RemoteOK.io. Was that one of yours?

DANIEL:

Oh no, I've never heard of that. I got to check that out. Thank you.

SARON:

Awesome! No problem. It’s a job web list where you find a job that you can do anywhere. It’s not just for developers. It has everything from design to – I think it’s mostly tech-focused. There's also other things. There's code instructors and QA and all kinds of things. But it’s remote jobs that tells you how long it’s been there for, what types of skills you need. And it looks really, really neat. And I feel like it’s such a great tool for people who are interested in working remotely. So that was my pick.

CHUCK:

Alright. I've got a couple of picks here. First off, I just want to remind everybody, we are doing Rails Remote Conf. The website’s up. You can go submit calls for proposals. You can also go and buy your tickets. The early bird tickets, I think, I have them set to end on October 5th. I think I'm going to extend that to October 10th. So don’t miss out on that because the prices do go up.

The other pick that I have is there's a website, I think it’s WeWorkRemotely.com. Anyway, it’s done by the guys that do Basecamp and these are all remote jobs and they've got a whole bunch of Ruby. I think I see some other stuff like Android and frontend. But anyway, you can go check that out as well – WeWorkRemotely.com again, for that Digital Nomad thing. I definitely enjoy working remotely.

The things that make it easier for me are Slack and Screenhero, so I’ll pick those as well. We’ll put links to those in the show notes.

Daniel, what are your picks?

DANIEL:

Something Pinegrow Web Editor which I just ran across and it kind of opened my eyes to something that I used to like years ago. Back in the day, we use things like maybe Dreamweaver or I think it was something called Coda on the Mac which were graphical HTML editors. And they all had some real big limitations. It always felt like I was hitting a brick wall with them. Eventually, I gave it up and went back to HTML and CSS and then TextMate or Sublime.

But I ran into this thing called Pinegrow Web Editor and I really am liking it because I get so frustrated with trying to set up like bootstrap grids and [inaudible]. I mean, we’re tagging Ruby which is pretty basic HTML stuff. But this is a graphical web editor for the 21st century. Actually, it does a whole bunch of stuff. I'm manipulating the DOM, so it actually generates live previews as you make any kind of changes, bootstrap layouts, all that. Pinegrow Web Editor, check it out.

My second pick and I mentioned it earlier is NomadList.io which is a website [inaudible] its destinations. And it provides weightings and info. I'm looking at it right now. You can go to Chiang Mai in Thailand, Phuket in Thailand. You can go to Budapest, Thessaloniki, Portland Oregon, Jeju Island in South Korea. It tells you the air quality, the weather, whether there's co-working spaces, whether it’s LGBT-friendly country, comfortable for women to be visiting and travelling in the country, how fast the Wi-Fi is. Data isn’t always accurate but even if your travel is only fantasy travel, it’s pretty cool to look at NomadList.io and think about the places you could go.

And finally, if you do get to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, KL as the locals say it, mostly because I think Kuala Lumpur is a tongue-twister. You got to check out Low Yat Plaza. Oh, my God! You could geek out. If you've been to the bay area of the old Fry’s, those giant supermarkets of computer parts, Low Yat Plaza puts Fry’s to shame. It’s like an order of magnitude of geeky gadgets.

CHUCK:

Oh yeah.

DANIEL:

It’s a shopping mall. And there's nothing in this 6-floor shopping mall but stalls upon stalls upon stores upon stores featuring really bargain-priced geekiness. You can get like the kind of adaptor cable that you might have to go to the Apple Store and pay $25 for, here it’s like $4 or $5 at Low Yat Plaza. It’s totally a place to totally geek out.

In the [inaudible], you can buy Apple products like a new MacBook Air for at least 20% less than it would cost in the United States because of not just the exchange rate but the pricing here in Malaysia is less for Apple products than just about anywhere else in the world for some reasons I don’t really know. But yeah, check out Low Yat Plaza in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

CHUCK:

Yeah, whenever I go down to Las Vegas, I usually wind up there once or twice a year.

Alright. Well, thank you Daniel for coming and thanks for all the work that you put in for the community. I think people really appreciate it. And if you don’t, then go check it out because it is really handy to be able to go and actually see a working application. Rails Composer, in my opinion, is just awesome.

DANIEL:

Oh, let me plug that Kickstarter campaign again because if anyone’s listening to this and it is not October 6th yet, please go check out the Kickstarter campaign for Rails Composer and help me take it to the next level. Thank you so much.

CHUCK:

Even if he has exceeded the goal, I can tell you, having run my own Kickstarter campaign, that every little bit of extra helps. So make sure that if you have used Rails Composer and you just want to throw a few dollars at it, awesome. If you want to go and actually back it and get access to the tutorials and things like that that are being offered, then do that too because a lot of times, this work is kind of thankless and this is our way of saying, “Hey, we want more of what you're doing.

We appreciate the work you're doing.” So, go chip in.

DANIEL:

Yeah. Thank you very much. The appreciation is really what drives my [inaudible] project and keeps me going. And when I hear back from people that they're using the tools, it’s like, “Yeah, that's why I want to be doing it.” It’s really uplifting.

CHUCK:

Alright. Well, thanks again for coming.

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227 RR Rails Composer, RailsApps and Tutorials with Daniel Kehoe

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