survey

What did you do to get good at Rails?
    I came from a PHP background, so the path I took was to workout how to do everything I knew with PHP
    in Ruby and Rails, as well as reading loads of source code and ripping parts out and making smaller apps.

Who taught you what you know?
    Mainly Google, I didn't know anyone using Rails for the first year or more.

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

What was your first production app and what did you learn from it?
    For my year 12 Design & Technology Major Work I built an online portfolio app with Ruby on Rails,
    pretty much a copy of CarbonMade.com, this taught me everything, from which was the best plugin for 
    file uploads, resizing, down to deployment and configuring Apache with FastCGI or Mongrel proxies (Pre ModRails :) 

What tools do you use to make your life easier?
    TextMate with a lot of Ruby related plugins :)

What did you find particularly hard to grok when learning Rails?
    I think the magic behind ActiveRecord, while it comes with immense awesomeness, it also made the 
    database layer harder to learn.

When did you start on Rails?
    July 2006.

Did you learn Ruby first or try to jump straight into Rails?
    I'd say I learn't Ruby more as a side effect of learning Rails

Did you read any books to get good at Rails? 
    Didn't have access to any.

What system do you use?
    Mac/Linux

What editor do you prefer?
    Textmate to the death.