Rails mentoring
A great way to learn is by teaching others. Why? Because explaining solutions to others gives you a greater understanding of the problem and the solution itself. I have never had any opportunities to really mentor anyone before. Recently, I signed up to RailsMentors site as a mentor and few weeks after that I actually got a chance to help someone with their Rails issues. It has given me a good understanding of someone else’s approach to Rails and the places where they usually get stuck. It’s not just mentoring, you always find some nice tricks someone has used.
For instance, I helped him set up CanCan in the app and advised about using TDD (with Rspec and Cucumber). In addition, I suggested using faker along with factory_girl to seed the database and helped them with routing issues.
Learning is not just one way. I found this cool way in javascript to load and use a font from his code and it was fun and satisfying helping someone out with their issues. Here’s a proof of my performance.