From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2006-11-11T07:48:04+09:00
Subject: Re: looking for some feedback about Certification

Patrick Hurley wrote:
> On 11/10/06, Gustav Paul <gustav@rails.co.za> wrote:
>> pat eyler wrote:
>> >  1) Is Ruby ready for/in need of a certification program?
> 
> With the growing size of the Ruby community (and demand for Ruby
> programmers) there will undoubtedly be programs of this sort. Of
> course having said that, I personally consider certifications programs
> (especially for programming languages) one of the worst hiring metrics
> available. If you want to find a good programmer, looking for a
> language specific certificate is a terrible mistake.

What about assigning each student to make contributions to ruby and to 
the community, so that they have something concrete and visible to point 
to? For example:

- write std lib docs

- write tests for std libs

- write a brief article or blog entry, with newbies in mind as the readers

- contact a project maintainer (on rubyforge for example) and ask for a 
suitable task (not SoC level, but not trivial, either)

-- 
       vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407