I have been using Ruby and Ruby on Rails now for more than 5 years, and whenever I’m asked how to start with Ruby, I struggle. There are lots of materials out there, but getting started with one’s development environment is actually quite hard. I would like to see this situation improve by providing a more beginner friendly environment. The tools for the first start will be a tutorials encapsulated in a Docker container - one for Ruby and one for Ruby on Rails - that should be easy to install on Windows, Linux and Mac PCs.

Further more I lately joined a Nodeschool event and I was quite impressed about the for amount of material they have put together.

So I’m currently thinking about including a nodeschool like command line application with at least to lessons. One for starting with Ruby, one for starting with Rails, that should complement each other.

If you want to see this situation improved as well, join in at ‘Ruby Starters’ project, where we will to build this environment. I’m not afraid of failing (nor you should be), because we will have lots of options, how we can use and publish all out findings along the way.

I would be happy to hear your comments on this and even more, if you want to join in and help me with this. I could need help in some many areas, especially from people who have still a beginner’s mind, so the matter of experience you have with Docker, Ruby or Rails actually doesn’t matter.

Stefan aka @informatom