survey

What did you do to get good at Rails?

I just kept at it and worked with it on a professional basis. Constantly learning about new things and working with people who do Rails is also a good start.

Who taught you what you know?

The internet, friends/coworkers and Dr Nic. That, and trial and error. I guess one of the benefits of Rails is many things are implicit and make sense, but sometimes it has quirks and the internet documents a lot of these quirks.

Do you have any fond (or not so fond) memories of your learning experiences?

Mainly frustrated by bugs that didn't make sense in Rails, but nothing comes to mind.

What was your first production app and what did you learn from it?

Add indexes and writing code without tests suck because when you change something, things may break horribly and you don't have time to test them all.

What tools do you use to make your life easier?

Cucumber, Textmate and Dvorak. Another slightly different thing I do is bind all common applications to shortcuts I can reach with just my left hand. It increases productivity by a decent chunk when you don't have to think about how many times to press Command-Tab.

What did you find particularly hard to grok when learning Rails?

The ActiveRecord quirks and how to test.

When did you start on Rails?

2007 I think, after I was tired of PHP being PHP and discovered it via CodeIgniter which was based off Rails' MVC architecture.

Did you learn Ruby first or try to jump straight into Rails?

Straight into Rails. I learn frameworks and languages by picking a decent-sized project and just going at it until it's done.

Did you read any books to get good at Rails? 

Nope.

What system do you use?

OS X on either my MBP or my hackintosh at home.

What editor do you prefer?

Textmate, but thinking about alternatives since Textmate has issues that annoy me.