Are there any tools to make a non-railsy front end developer's life easier?

Ruby on Rails
1

We just brought on board a pretty talented front end person, but a little one-dimensional; he has almost no back end experience.

So we are introducing him to Rails and MVC and showing him how to work in the views.

He understands everything, but the things that throw him are the occasional gem errors when bundling, dependencies, things that are just really new to him. I know eventually he will level up, but it does bring up the question: is there a way that front-end developers who are narrow specialists, I guess, work on rails apps without needing to run the rails app in development?

Just wondering.

Phil

2

No silver bullets here, but I’d try to get the better_errors gem on your machine, as I think it makes the errors less intimidating, and has a far easier stack trace to read. In the event that your problem is very close to the developer-level code, he might have an easier time seeing what’s going on, which is the beginning of understanding how to debug.