You’re focusing on finding that first Ruby job. You’ve been practicing for months or years. You’ve been applying to entry-level jobs, even internships. You polish your resume. Tweak your portfolio. Attach your CV. Press Submit. Chirp, chirp, chirp 🦗 Nothing happens. Worse: you do an amazing interview, people loved you. But then they say they are moving forward with someone else that has more experience. Welp, next time is going to be different....

When you get stuck, it’s really easy to block yourself from creatively solving your problem. You start asking “why am I so dumb?”, or thinking that you don’t have a programmer’s brain, or feeling that you’ll never understand anything. How is that helpful? It isn’t. The way we talk to each other (even to ourselves) impacts our performance. It’s not self-help BS. It’s how our brain works....

You’re working on your coding project. Everything is going well. But it doesn’t take too long until you get stuck on your assignment. You try everything you possibly can, with the resources you have. You are mixing Ruby, JavaScript, Postgres. Doing crash courses, googling. You go to the docs but you don’t even know where to look. It’s almost as if it’s a foreign language. On StackOverflow, you see the same tips over and over....

You got that first job as an early career software engineer after a long job hunt. You are ready to learn a lot and advance in your career. Most times you’re fine, but sometimes you worry that you don’t contribute much value to your team. That you ask stupid questions all the time. Or that you don’t have the domain-specific knowledge required to estimate tickets accurately or to handle bugs quickly....

You show your GitHub project to people but they don’t understand what the code is about. Why should you take time to write a good README if they can simply “read the code”? They won’t even look at your code if you don’t explain what’s in it for them. Why should anyone care about it? What about making them curious about your project? It saves them time, it shows you care about good communication and that by writing good docs you probably write good code as well....

Let’s say you’re learning how to paint. When you look at the famous paintings at the museum, you might start asking yourself: “Will I ever be this good? Is this for me? Will I ever get to paint something like this?” If these questions sound familiar, it’s because you’re not alone. It’s not just you. The same questions can be applied to coding. Some things, like painting and learning how to code, are hard....

“Why is it so difficult to find Junior Ruby on Rails dev roles?" You have finished multiple online courses, workshops and might even read some books to learn Ruby. You start job hunting and you struggle to land a position because of your lack of experience. So how do you get experience with large Ruby and Rails apps when no one wants to hire early-career devs? It’s a tough market for any early-career dev with little to no experience, so it’s no different with Ruby....

Now that all Rails Conf 2021 talks, keynotes and workshops are available on YouTube, you might be wondering which ones you should watch first. If you are just getting started with your Rails or programming journey, here’s a list of 6 talks for you (with resources): 1. Implicit to Explicit: Decoding Ruby’s Magical Syntax by Justin Gordon [Talk] Do you wish you could understand better what Rails does under the hood?...

In the last Open Source Thursdays live, Thiago and I shared how we chose a few issues that looked promising for us. By the end of the post, you’ll learn how to filter issues, and how to start contributing to Rails by reproducing a bug. How to choose your first Ruby on Rails issue Which one from the +300 open issues should you pick? We tried breaking this process down into 2 parts: filtering them by labels, then choosing one that seems easier to fix....

What is Open Source Thursdays? Open Source Thursdays is a new project from the hexdevs team, aka me and Thiago. We started this project because we’ve always wanted to contribute to rails! So we thought, why not do it live so more people can join us? Our goal is to make open source contributions more popular. Neither of us has done this before. The plan is to get there and do everything live, no preparing in advance....