Week two of the facebook open academy project was not as eventful as the first one. Apparently the mentors won’t start mentoring until the hackathon next week (or at least that’s what we think since only one of them answered our email in which we asked what we could do for the project, and she didn’t even know), so we couldn’t do much. Since we didn’t get instructions on how we could start contributing and couldn’t find any unsolved easy enough issues by ourselves, we spent the week studying more about Rails mostly by doing Rails related courses on an online learning platform called Codeschool, for which Henrik already had a subscription. This week we also finalized our travel plans and got the tickets, so everything is finally set on that front. Apart from the lack of instructions, the week went well and we made some progress in learning the skills required for the project.

Progress so far

Last week we concentrated on learning about the Ruby on Rails framework and how it’s built. At least for me, it wasn’t very effective as the source code was quite complex and I had already forgotten some of Rubys syntax and features. The documenation on that side is also lacking a bit, so we had to rely on reading the source code and a couple of code walkthrough videos, which didn’t help the situation much. While I did of course learn some things, I think, at least on my part, the time could’ve been used more effectively.

So this week we concentrated more on how to actually do things with Ruby on Rails by going through courses about Rails testing and Rails 4 features on Codeschool. I think this is a better way to learn about the framework at this point, as it helps me get a more general understanding of it. It will certainly be easier to dive deeper into the workings of some part of the framework when you know what you can do with that part. In addition to this, I coded through the Ruby course on Codecademy, which was very helpful as it brought back a lot of the things that I had forgotten and I also learned new ways of doing things with Ruby that I didn’t know about before.

Next weeks

Next week we are going to California for the code sprint! I’m excited but a bit nervous as well. I’m sure things will start ramping up when we are there and we will finally be able to start contributing. I hope the mentors have a lot of good issues for us to solve, or some small feature that we could start implementing. So the beginning of next week we will probably continue doing the same stuff we did this week, and the end of the week we will travel and finally start coding.