What to learn

I wanted to learn a modern framework so I decided that Rails would be a great starting point. But with all the aspects of a full framework its often hard to decide where to start. Quite often in dealing with a project it is really hard to get all the pieces in place. Each person has their own skills and abilities, and each feels that they deserve a majority of the project budget on any aspect.

For a recent bid when discussing a project I talked over the project with 5 people and each person had claimed the entire budget. They did not understand the basics that each aspect of any project had to share with the other parts. Each part needed its own share of the money, and each part was equally important.

So the results are if you plan on having a team in which each person specialize on one aspect. Such as a dedicated Haml, Sass, JavaScript libraries, or Ruby, developer you have as option 1. If you don’t you have to master it all, each person can do 1 aspect of any project. The second option fits me, I personally don’t work with a large team. I know what I can’t / don’t want to do, so those bits I outsource to other developer. E.g. I personally don’t care the be a graphic artist, the result is I outsource it. But for the vast majority I spend a lot of time learning. I want to master it all that is the reality. I want to be able to do 90% of any project from start to finish.

My plan

My goal for this project is spend 1 hour a day learning, such as reading books, searching the web, or watching a movie. Then I spend 1 hour a day applying what I learned by coding. And then I spend 30 minutes or so a day writing up what I just did.

Over the last few months, I have done more learning than doing, and some days I spend more time on the different Rails projects than other days. But for the most part I have kept to this plan, and it seems to be working out well.