The first of these people is Sam Elliot. Sam Elliot is a guy from Scotland who is passionate about Ruby. He jumped straight into Rails in late-2007, without even trying Ruby. He said the Rails site looked great and he wondered how powerful it was. He regrets this experience now saying that Ruby was hard to understand in the beginning but he pushed through with it without the aid of any Rails or Ruby books. He made a blog which had separate sections for work + play, even had separate comment feeds. It received a total of 3 hits (all him) before he removed the directory, wanting to start fresh from all the things that he learned. This seems to be a common thing to do when you're starting out as I did it also with rboard and not just once either. When he couldn't find an answer he'd look for the method in the docs and when that was hiding he would ask in the IRC channel and the people from the IRC channel would sometimes give him a refactored version of his code which he would learn from. He uses a Macbook Pro and has previously used TextMate but has now switched over to Vim citing "Hashrocket uses it, so it must be cool!". He enjoys some features such as the split panes, something that TextMate does not offer. He also uses Sinatra, another Ruby framework serving a similar purpose to Rails but more lightweight. Sam says that the one thing he wished he brushed up more on was testing because he is not confident in the code he is writing and having tests would ensure that the code was accurate.