Learning Ruby and rBongo with WeBongo

This post should have been written quite a while ago as I wanted to start documenting my efforts to learn to program using Ruby. As most of you know I have been trying for a while to teach myself to programe.

I started my efforts with a course in c# at a company in London, the course was just great and the instructor was a fantastic guy. Unfortunately life meant I could not practice at all. I worked for a company for a year that gave me no opportunity to play during the day and having a newborn baby left my wife and I looking more like zombies that real people.

Then things changed the year before last when I Joined Forward as a contractor to help them with their Virtual infrastructure. This company is completly different to anywhere I have ever worked before. Normaly as a contractor you are shoved in a corner and beat with a whip so that they get the most out of you, here at Forward this is definitly not the case.

Forward has some really great intelligent developers who are a pleasure to work with and be part of and that is where I was going with this post.

A short while ago Fred George held one of his famous OO Bootcamp training sessions and I was lucky enough to be invited to join and true to Freds statement he tries to keep the course at a level where you always feel stupid and belive me I felt REALLY stupid. The good thing about feeling stupid was I actually learnt something. You kind of learn to program by accident (quoting Tom Hall).

This is where the Ruby, rBongo, WeBogo bits come in. Fred uses Ruby to illustrate OO programming best practice and to help you understand OO in general a side effect of this is that you start learning ruby syntax and start learning the programming vocabulary needed to accomplish the tasks, having gained some experience with ruby during the course I thought it best to use ruby to continue learning to program.

I have been working on Bongo since it was founded and the other day I was speaking to Alex the project lead and we realised it is almost 10 years now. I have always wanted to contribute more than just packaging the app on the OBS and being available to do testing and such. Alex wrote the PHP binding for the Bongo Store and having seen what some of the guys can do at Forward with Ruby and jQuery I wanted to create a binding for the store in Ruby and create a gem from it thus allowing anyone to create the best REST interface ever.

This is forcing me to learn TCP Sockets win Ruby and other nice things. I will try to document as often as I can what I am upto on this.

My efforts will be on 2 Ruby projects. Initially I will need to work on rBongo which is the ruby binding for the Bongo store I am sure most of the developers at Forward could probably write this in a day or so, hopefully I can convince one or two of them to help out .

My second effort will be on WeBongo the REST webui for the Bongo mail store. I have other ideas for the webui once we have a working solution (using it as a sync destination for Tomboy desktop notes)

Please keep that in mind as I try to get this working.