Square 101

It’s a new chapter for me. After 14years, 7months at IBM, I’ve decided to give it a go in a new arena. Square has given me a chance to work for them, and I took it.

The newest challenge for this job is learning Ruby. IBM zSeries uses a proprietary language, and so my exposure and experience in other languages is through side projects only. I have zero experience in Ruby or Ruby on Rails.

Some resources that have been useful so far are:

Ruby Koans — learn by editing little Ruby files

Getting Started with Rails — build a blog in Rails in about 20 minutes

So far, I love the fact that Ruby is a very expressive language and allows a lot more flexibility in expression. There are 5 ways to do everything, nothing is typed, and you can pass blocks of code around as Objects. Also, because it’s interpreted, there is no compile step which means you can test changes nearly immediately. Ruby has enterprise usages all over the world. I’m excited to step deeper and deeper into that arena.