Wow, what a couple of weeks(moths) it has been…

My intro to rails began a few months ago when a good friend and webdev guy told me he was using it heavily and suggested i check it out… I have never had any real programming experience and while the rails intro video was cool I just couldn’t really get into it (scared i think). SO, i stayed away for a little while, then came back and jumped on the band wagon by adopting Typo , a nice little blogging app with a lot of functionality, all built on rails… this saved me from having to learn how to program for a few more months and started to wet my appetite to learn more.

Then, about 4 weeks ago someone(who shall remain nameless) looked me up and asked me to build a webapp… I could have shoved the project off on Joshaven, but he is already crazy busy, so i decided to commit. No more hiding in the shadows, no more chickening out because I don’t know how to program, no more excuses… SO, I warned the client that I had no idea what i was doing and asked if he was still willing to pay me, and he was :-) so now I’m knee deep in this stuff and its only getting deeper…

After throwing together a pretty much non-functional demo, and convincing myself that i could do this, I decided I needed to read a book on programming in ruby before i could really get comfortable in rails. So i ran on down to why’s poignant guide to ruby and finished it in a weekend. Since then life has been a lot easier, at least as far as programming goes.

So I jumped back into the project, started from scratch, and built a highly functional, even pretty, demo in 20 hours (two days)… The client liked it and my friends and family even checked it out. That was Tuesday of last week.

Today is Sunday, although by the time I post this it will be Monday. I spent 3 days trying to get RMagick installed on my computer, finally succeeding late last night. Since then I’ve revamped version 1 of the webapp to run faster, use better naming schemes, and have cleaner code all around (thanx for the input xian , i took your advice on combining controllers).

And that is my learning rails experience. Five slow months of avoiding the inevitable and then four crazy rubyonrails filled weeks.\