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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....

If you’re someone who decided to change careers to work as a web developer, then you might be having a hard time trying to land your first job. You aren’t alone. We all have heard that there are tons of tech jobs in the market but there aren’t qualified professionals to fulfill them. So you go and spend days doing online courses and getting certifications so you can join the wave....

Step 1: Decide to find one open-source project to contribute 😎 Step 2: Keep looking 👀 Step 3: They are all intimidating, is that normal? 😑 Step 4: What if I contributed to a project I have lots of experience with, like rails? I’d love to understand more about this tool I use every day 🤔 Step 5: OMG, the code is huge and scary, Will this even run on my machine?...