[apsurd]

I've always assumed when people said "if you can code" they meant, well.

From what I've heard/experienced the thinking is there is an overwhelming percentage of software developers who are mediocre. So all that I take your meme to mean is that if you are better than that majority then yes, a job is waiting for you - I agree.

I don't think your average developer knows how to write native, optimized, sql queries. I actually am peeved more and more with rails because you basically spend all your time learning how to be a rails programmer. Your world becomes AR voodoo, and you work toward gem integration mastery. It's kind of weird imo. I doubt most rails devs know how to write a gem!

So that's just my take on it from things I've seen and experienced. It's generally good advice to not reinvent the wheel. Well in the rails community I feel they take it too far. How do you expect to get better if you let everyone else program for you? Forcing yourself to build out some of your own components may take a lot more time but those are the things that level you up as a developer.

I can't say this approach is common, and therefore, good programmers are rare.

[caw]

I was noticing this, as I've been trying to learn Rails. I already know some Ruby and I wanted to try to learn the web framework so I just didn't know CakePHP. The gem thing is getting to me. I understand gems as a function of something like user authentication or sending emails. That works great, it's like Perl modules.

Now I wanted a Ruby based shopping cart to make an e-commerce site. From my googling, there pretty much was only spree. It's all voodoo because, no, you're not supposed to modify the source code. You're supposed to use yet another gem to patch the code so you can have your custom additions, or you code based on hooks. But the documentation for this is scarce, especially since it seems they just changed this in one of the latest releases. Drupal, on the other hand, has extensive documentation and random blogs. I don't know if everyone else "just gets it" and I'm just left out here in the cold because I'm new.

I gave up and just worked on the Agile Web Development with Rails shopping cart. I now understand 100% of the code base I'm using and can make it do whatever I want.

I would like to think I'm a decent coder, as I can produce readable code, albeit not at a super fast speed, but I think that's a function of not doing it every day at work since I'm in IT and not web development.