Suppose someone told you that they are an Olympic athlete. What would you know about them? You could safely assume that they’re in great physical shape. But you’d have to ask more questions: what kind of athlete are you? Are you a swimmer? A runner? Maybe you do archery?

Even knowing the sport might not reveal all of their talents. For example, many Olympic events have a variety of events associated with them. To qualify for the swim team, you have to swim in multiple ways: freestyle, butterfly, backstroke, and breast stroke. Gymnasts also have to be good at a lot of things to be considered Olympic material: not only the floor exercise, but also the pommel horse, vault, and rings, and I don’t know what else.

Swimmers who only excel at freestyle swimming might be great at freestyle swimming, but they’ll never really be able to be good enough to make the Olympic team. Gymnasts who are great at the pommel horse, but never bother to learn the other disciplines, won’t make the team either.

Umm… Isn’t This Blog About Rails?

Ok, I’m getting to the point… Perhaps you currently consider yourself to be a real cool Rails developer. But do you really take the time to learn all of different skills that entails?

If there was a Rails event at the Olympics, would you qualify?

Here are the main “events” that I think Rails developers need to be good at to be considered “Olympic” quality.

Ruby

First and foremost, how is your Ruby? When was the last time you learned something new about Ruby? I don’t mean Rails. I mean Ruby. If you haven’t been able to refactor your code into something simpler and clearer, then you probably need to spend more time with the Ruby language.

ActiveRecord

ActiveRecord has actually gotten pretty big. Some features may exist that you don’t know about, or don’t know how to use (has_many :through and named_scope come to mind). Learn them. Use them. They can simplify your code. Not sure about the difference between association proxies and arrays? Wondering what SQL calls ActiveRecord is really making on your behalf? Then it’s time to do some strength conditioning and learn more about it.

Views

Maybe you’re feeling pretty good with your HTML views. How about your Javascript skills? Are you using the best possible form_for syntax in your views? Have you learned how to use view helpers to DRY up your view code?

SQL

Just because ActiveRecord writes SQL for you doesn’t mean you don’t have to learn SQL. It’s a muscle that we Rails developers can avoid using, but that probably mean that it’s atrophied. I know for myself, SQL is probably my weakest link when it comes to Rails development. I need to spend more time in the SQL gym, so I can better understand and improve upon the database performance in my apps.

REST

If you’re not doing RESTful development, but you’re using Rails 1.2 or higher, then you really need to get on the ball. Or maybe you think you’ve got the RESTful thing down pat, but you still end up adding a bunch of custom actions to your controllers. If so, then it’s time to see your friendly neighborhood trainer and get your REST skills in shape. Your apps (and your boss) will thank you.

Anything Else

You probably feel a twinge of guilt about some area of Rails that you know you should get better at, but you just never seem to have the time. Do you know how to write a plugin? Do you know how to contribute a patch to Rails? Do you need to get better with subversion or git? How about deployment? The list could go on and on.

If you want to say you’re a professional Rails developer, you can’t just be good at script/generate model Product. Identify what you want to learn next, and learn it.

Have you learned something recently that really helped you get to the next level in your Rails coding? Or, is there a weak area that you know you want to get better at? Drop us a comment and let us know.

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Ready to learn all about REST with Rails? Our next workshop is coming up fast (Oct 4, 2008), so register now before all the seats are taken.