I get asked a lot about what it takes to break into the Ruby on Rails industry at the various hackathons and start up weekends I have attended. Spurred by this /r/ruby question. I shall try my best to answer this question in a public setting.

I want to this in an entry level rails developer

  1. Build a CRUDL application
  2. Understand and apply bootstrap
  3. Build a to-do application or any simple super basic app that requires a few controllers, models, etc.
  4. Use slightly obscure gems, like the twitter, koala, mandrill, kaminari, jbuilder, etc. to prove to me that they can read the documentation and figure out how to use a gem.

Bonuses

  1. Understanding a testing framework (rspec is my preference)
  2. Knowing some basic javascript (jquery)
  3. Know TDD
  4. Knowing Thin Controllers, Fat Models
  5. Attends the local ruby on rails meetup