Keeping in the Agile spirit, I did a retrospective for Iteration Zero of my Season of Ruby. When I conduct a retrospective I cover 3 areas:
- What did we do well
- What can we improve on
- What are we going to focus on in the next iteration to improve the process or the product
I am a team of 1 on this journey, so “we” is me.
What Went Well
- Digging the Ruby Koans – I’m happy that I am not just blowing through them to get to the next subject, but asking questions when something doesn’t make sense or surprises me. I also find myself adding additional tests to experiment with behaviors
- Love playing around in the IRB – This also has a lot to do with experimenting and following where my curiosity takes me.
- Got a Ruby environment set – OK, so it is not the shiny new Mac I wanted, but RubyMine on my Windows laptop has been a very low-friction experience. The Mac will come. I have a birthday coming up and maybe I will be good to me.
What Can Be Improved On
- Not writing enough code – Although I am learning with the Ruby Koans, I am not writing enough code.
- Making really good progress, but need to dedicate more time – I’m happy with where I am, but the time goes by quickly. May need to dedicate just a little more time on a weekly basis.
- Haven’t done anything with github yet – One of the goals was to set up a github account. Technically I have satisfied that criteria because I have an account…an empty account. That needs to change
What Am I Going To Do To Improve Things
As a rule, I usually only like to pick one thing to improve on, especially in a short iteration, but since these two things go so well together:
- Do the String kata in Ruby – It’s a pretty straightforward problem, one that I have done in C# and C++, and this will get me actually writing code
- Put the String kata in github, committing as new functionality is added.
Iteration 1 Stories
- Continue with the Ruby Koans, doing these exercises
- ‘about_methods’
- ‘about_constants’
- ‘about_control_statements’
- ‘about_true_and_false’
- ‘about_triangle_project’
- ‘about_exceptions’
- Do the String kata in Ruby in a github repo
Old Dog, New Tricks 
I love this idea of a retrospective on your Ruby learning project. I think you may be prompting me to start blogging my experience learning Clojure…
It is as much as anything a way to keep myself honest, but also to track my progress. Unfortunately when we go through a learning process we tend to forget the successes and failure that we have as we went along, and then when we try to go back…poof…it is gone.
Good luck with the Clojure, I hope you do blog about it.