I'm at the point in my development of Ruby on Rails learning where the grace period of being a beginner has worn off and it's time for me to transition to an intelligent Rails developer. I need to start engineering my mind to look for the elegant solution at the beginning of the project as opposed to looking back on my code at the end and wondering how I could have done it better. I believe the development community uses the expression 'cut my teeth' to describe this chapter of professional development for a developer. I believe the first step is to admit that there will be many roadblocks along the way where I will become frustrated with wrapping my head around certain concepts and humbled by discovering how much I have yet to learn. I plan to catalog the roadblocks I encounter on this blog as a way for other Rails developers to hopefully learn from my mistakes.
My new priority will be stepping back and opening my mind to tackle problems with the new tools I have been learning. I'm going to go after projects that I have no idea how to do and instead of looking for a block of code on Google to solve my problem or asking one of my colleagues what they would do, I'm going to work through the solution process myself. I expect to re-invent the wheel a couple of times, which would typically be thought of as inefficient, but I'm hoping the short-term losses in productivity will yield greater gains in the long run. With that having been said, bring on the pain!
Dan DeMeyere
Ruby on Rails Newbie...err...Novice and Front-end Engineer
dan@thredup.com