Taking a look at Java, from a Ruby Guy
By: Parker Williamson
Tags: Ruby on Rails, Java, JavaScript

This week I started to look at Java. I was not initially going to venture out past my normal stack of Ruby on Rails, JavaScript React and Redux, but I have a few friends who are going through bootcamps and college and asked me to take a look at their work. From what I was told about coding, is once you understand one language, you can learn the rest very quickly, and at least read and understand the other languages in their syntax.

I found this to be very true surprisingly. It was very basic iteration and creating lists and dictionaries, but at first this sounded somewhat daunting. I was a little bit shocked when I learned that a list was an array, and a dictionary was a hash, and after that everything lined up for me. It showed me that other than lingo, there is just a few small differenced and it really is the same thing, just in a different order, syntax, or available calls.

One negative thing about going from Ruby to Java, was not knowing basic functions of Java, like the operator “in”, which was our solution. I started coding out a very “complex” for this entry level problem of figuring out GPAs due to my lack of knowledge, when the assignment ended up just being changing the call to “in” from the provided problem, and then creating a dictionary to store the data, and return the data.

To be completely honest, I don’t know how much more I will choose to dive into Java until I get into a work environment, because I would much rather perfect my current learning and become a better Ruby and JavaScript developer. As the saying goes “Jack of all trades, master of none”. This definitely shows to be true here because I can still learn so much more about Ruby and JavaScript, and with my picking up Java and learning that on the fly, I can see how it translates relatively smoothly. I want to practice my iteration and Leetcode style problem solving more, and get to the point where I can easily solve those problems on at least a medium level before I really venture off to something else.

I think I had just got a little bit over zealous with an internship opportunity that was going to be using Java, which ended up falling through. It did make me far more confident in applying to those types of internships knowing that I can take the learning they will provide and use that to progress in a way that they can see my true potential and further my career, and hopefully be able to stay with a company. I do have a very big love for Ruby development though, and I think that would be my ideal job opportunity.

With that being said, I did work on some of my previous projects this week for updating my Github, and just changed some visual things such as CSS and wording on parts of my websites I wasn’t happy with, and next week I will go deeper into adding functionality in to them that I didn’t have a chance in school. I will probably want to research what is really common with companies looking for Ruby developers and design something around that so I have have some practice and something to show for it. Having no professional experience with coding will lead me to need something to put me ahead of the rest, and maybe get me a foot in the door to try and wow someone in an interview.

I did get some good feedback from a few companies with my application that they may be going to the next level due to my reaching out to them and contacting the right people. One being in Nashville which would be a fun and amazing opportunity to see new places I haven’t had the privilege to visit. Most jobs with COVID are remote, and that is great to see if I will fit in with the company, and although it is remote, if things are going smooth I would want to relocate to where the headquarters is located (and it is significantly cheaper than being here in Seattle!).