The First Post: Why Ruby on Rails?

It was a few months after graduation in 2012 when I discovered Ruby on Rails. I was immediately impressed by the community and also surprised at how pleasant it was to code in Ruby. Having taken classes in Java and C++  in high school and college, I've always had a somewhat misguided impression of what programming really was.

However, learning Ruby showed me that programming can actually be fun, expressive, and even artistic.

So after some contemplation, I decided, "forget finance and marketing. I'm going into web development."
Because I knew this was something I would actually enjoy doing full-time.

Well, that and also the fact that the current job market clearly needs more web devs. I'm always looking to learn new things, so why not learn some new valuable skills and contribute to a great demand? All the resources I need are already at the tip of my fingers.

I have learned basic programming and made websites before all of this, but I really started to dig into web development in late 2012. Since then, I've been studying everything from Ruby to jQuery. Needless to say, it has been quite an overwhelming experience, but I think I'm beginning to have a solid foundation for everything.

A couple examples of web apps I've built:
www.lightshow.me, a for-fun project I built using Wordpress and PhpBB3 before getting into Rails.
And during my self-education for the past many months, I developed a real Ruby on Rails app for my mini-business, www.inkmasks.com. It was done using the Spree Commerce gem which took care of most of the e-commerce functionality, so it felt a bit like cheating. That's not to say I didn't learn a lot; I definitely gained valuable experience taking a real application from scratch to production.

The next step will be for me to build a Rails app the old-fashioned way—implementing the main functionality with my own code instead of using a gem.