survey.md

What did you do to get good at Rails?

Write apps. Deploy them.

Who taught you what you know?

I learnt most stuff for myself. Eventually I got into #caboose and was able to ask a lot more questions directly to the people that wrote rails + the plugins I used.

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

I enjoyed finding fun aspects of ruby and making little gems from them, e.g. Magic Models.

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

MyConfPlan - write tests. Hobo was great and I wrote the app fast, but when it started failing I had no test coverage.

What tools do you use to make your life easier?

Make my own tools. TextMate bundles. GitHub command line tool.

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

Deployment. Took me a very long time to figure out deployment. I also didn't feel I had to pay for monthly slices, so I suffered trying to deploy to TextDrive shared hosting.

When did you start on Rails?

mid-2005

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

Straight to Rails

Did you read any books to get good at Rails?

Rails Recipes and Advanced Rails Recipes

What system do you use?

OS X now, I used Windows XP for 1.5 years

What editor do you prefer?

TextMate, though I used RadRails for 1.5 years when I was on a PC