Hi there!
You've just finished some of the most intensive and hardest weeks of your life. But you've made it! And you are now fullstack developers, able to build great web projects from scratch.
But Le Wagon is just the beginning of a long journey. Being a developer is an incredibly rewarding position because you get to learn new things everyday. With this repository, I want to share with you some tips and resources to keep on improving you skills as efficiently as possible.
One of the most difficult things after Le Wagon is that you won't have teacher and TA anymore to help you everyday. Of course, you have Le Wagon community on Slack but it is not as instantaneous as a ticket. After Le Wagon, you should aim at being really autonomous to solve your code problems as soon as possible. To do this, you need 3 skills:
- Learn how to read your error messages
- Become a binding.pry god
- Learn how to Google a problem
Learn how to read your error messages During the bootcamp, you may have seen teachers solving problems you had been struggling on for dozens of minutes just by reading your error message. It takes some practise but learning how to find you error message and how to read it will solve 90% of your problems. Sometimes it will give you directly an answer, most of the time it will narrow the scope of the problem. Good developer are (almost) happy when they see an error message because they know it will help them solve their problem.
Become a binding.pry god When the error message does not directly give you an answer, learn how to debug with binding.pry (or debugger for javascript). Every time I see a bug I don't quite understand, the first thing I do is put a binding.pry in my code to see what is going on and how do my variables look like at this specific moment. With good binding.pry skills, you will rock in the developer world. P.S: Aaron Patterson, one of the most famous Ruby developer, is a "puts debugger". It is another way to deal with errors. Enjoy this article to learn more.
Learn how to Google a problem When you are facing a problem you really don't know, get used to Google it. 99.9% of the times, you will find somebody who had a pretty similar problem on StackOverflow. Google skills are the most important ones for a developer.
Here are my personal advices about how to progress after Le Wagon. I myself did/read half of them and heard really good reviews from other Le Wagon alumni about the other ones. You can find free PDF of most of the following books on the web but, if you can, please support the authors ;)
If you know Ruby well, Rails will be so much easier!
- Read (Eloquent Ruby)[http://eloquentruby.com/]
- Read (Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby)[http://www.poodr.com/]
- If you likes 2), read 99 bottles of OOP
- Subscribe to Ruby Tapas
Because of course!
- Read the Rails guides
- Read The Rails 5 Way
- Read RailsAntiPatterns
- Subscribe to Go Rails