Day 2️⃣: Continuing with Ruby

If you haven’t been following this series, you can read all articles about my career break here. Read about yesterday here.

So, Day 2 was more about diving further into Ruby and exploring how it handles different object types, control structures, and date & time. It has already surprised me with how elegant it is; so far, it looks like an easy-to-read and easy-to-write language even for large codebases.

The fluidity of Ruby’s arrays and hashes was the first thing that struck me with no fussing about static sizes or forcing all members to be of the same type. Its close resemblance to English and the plethora of helper methods make it feel as if you’re explaining the logic aloud while writing the code. Rather than making me memorize syntax, Ruby hands over obvious, almost self-explanatory methods like reverse, uniq, compact, and so on. Even concepts like the “?” for boolean checks and the “!” for in-place changes focus on English-like, conversational logic.

That sense of ease extends to control structures, with conditionals and loops that echo natural language more than traditional programming rigidity. From “unless” (which feels perfectly at home in a real sentence) to neat helpers for handling times, ranges, and hashes, I find myself spending less time decoding and more time understanding and building.

These are early days, so I’m still collecting small delights: a script that asks for input (“gets”) without acrobatics, a timestamp retrieved or formatted without three layers of coercion. There’s a remarkable empathy woven through its design. It’s hard not to notice or appreciate what happens when a language actually meets you halfway.

I’m genuinely stoked to go deeper, planning to explore object-oriented constructs next (Classes and Inheritance), and to spend more time with the basics by solving some leetcode problems – not for the sake of practice, but to express more with the language and compare its performance with Python, which remains my most-used language.

Slight Detour

Part of the day also went into a detour: trying out much-hyped AI tools like HeyGen and Suno just to get a feel for what they can actually do. I was equally surprised by the quality of outcomes from both. This kind of confirms a previous hypothesis I had about AI, which is that it will lead to a time of unlimited content to scroll through by removing barriers to produce.

Check out my first video generated on HeyGen using just the free version below. There are plenty of examples online showing what it can do with a paid subscription.

https://app.heygen.com/videos/e0f6e8346094425397aabacbb8eb2239

And here’s a song generated about my dog Baburao with a minimal prompt on Suno.com: https://suno.com/s/0Y6DRGxSmHlkL3Ns

Stay tuned for more updates tomorrow! 🙌