Editor Note: “Habitatize Yourself” a Ruby Web Application is a YouTube series hosted by Franklin Webber. This series takes you from idea to Habitat-packaged Ruby application in a lunch break. Watch, learn and code along with him and see how Habitat makes building, deploying, and managing modern applications delightful.
I made two attempts at learning Habitat over the past year. I watched all the available videos. Built and then rebuilt the sample applications in the tutorials. And when I was all done, I started to ask: what do I do now? This spurred me to create a new video series sharing my learning experiences to help accelerate your Habitat knowledge.
Kelsey Hightower’s Keynote at ChefConf 2017 inspired me. Particular this description on how he learns new things:
“I take something that I know and pair it up with something that I don’t know.” ~ Kelsey Hightower
Watching him playfully demonstrate Habitat working with Kubernetes brought me back to another requirement: for me to learn successfully, I need for my work to bring delight; even in tiny ways. His talk reminded me that learning is also play. Which brought me to creating animated GIFs in Ruby.
Within a few hours I had a working script generating images filled with a friend’s face. By late afternoon, the functioning web service was churning out animated images for all my co-workers. The next morning, with some help from the amazing Habitat Community and documentation, I had my web application successfully packaged with Habitat.
After a quick celebration, I went back to break down the application into a series of small exercises. I built the entire Ruby application and web service from scratch. Only interested in Habitat, skip ahead and focus on the exercises that:
If this resource helps make learning Habitat more approachable and delightful then I feel my work has made an impact. Through this entire process I learned a lot about Habitat and I hope you will as well.
Try these Habitat tutorials on Learn Chef Rally: