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:
- Use Habitat’s scaffolding to package a web application
- Upgrade and re-build an application dependency
- Reconfigure Habitat services through re-packaging and live updates
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.
Learn More
Try these Habitat tutorials on Learn Chef Rally:
- Demos and Quickstarts: Try Habitat
- Explore the ease of packaging, deploying, and running your applications with Habitat.
- Building Applications with Habitat
- Combine a few basic ingredients and you’ll have the recipe for building modern and legacy applications that run anywhere. See how plans help you build software consistently and how the Supervisor starts, monitors, and acts upon changes made to your services.
- Deploying Applications with Habitat
- Ready to serve up your app to your users? Use Habitat Builder to neatly package your app and anything it needs to run. Deploy your app to the cloud or anywhere else and keep it updated in real time.