So Holy Shit, I am coming up on my 7 month anniversary as a full time Ruby on Rails developer.  I guess the old adage that time flies when you are having fun.  So true indeed.

I figured that it has been a while since I posted and that I need to get with it again.  On a daily basis, I am still learning so many things.  I really need to share these findings and I will try to do more posting in the near future.

So being a partner with Rebelhold, LLC absolutely kicks ass.  We are still at 3 partners but we now have two paid apprentices and working on adding a third very soon.  It is so nice to be able to return the favor that Rebelhold showed me by teaching me RoR and how to be a good developer.  I am still lead developer on a big project and I have one paid intern that I am teaching now.  I have also brought on another intern that as of yet has not made it to paid status but I feel that is not so far off in the future.  I was asked a while back what I have done for the Ruby community, and this is what I have done and do.  To top that off, we do not charge to teach and on the contrary, we pay our interns to learn once they have established a basic knowledge of RoR.  It is a goal for us at Rebelhold to train apprentices to work for us.  If they choose not to work for us after the training, then so be it but we still intend to continue teaching members of our community, regardless of who they do to work for.

We as Rebelhold has risen to the go to Rails shop in Arizona.  Many of the other Rails shops do not have the resources available that we do.  We have dev's waiting for us to get more work so that they may come on board as well.  Rebelhold will continue to be a go to Rails shop and we plan on expanding to other languages and platforms as well.

Ok , so enough preaching for now.  I wanted to share some things that I learned over the last 7 months and hopefully somebody finds some of this as useful.  So here it goes........

• Keep learning
  • I don't care how many hours a day or days a week that you are working, find the time to learn something new EVERY day.  There are so many tutorials out there that there are too many to list.  A good way to end the day is to watch a tutorial or try something new.
• Write Code
  • A lot of beginners get stuck in the keep learning part.  Watching tutorials and coding along is great.  Studying all there is to know about Ruby and Rails is great.  However, you will learn the MOST by trial and error.  Write code, write code and write code.  Create as many blogs, fake store fronts or whatever you want to but keep writing code.
• Mentors
  • Aside from the fact that Rubyists are really arrogant, they love to talk about Ruby.  I have NEVER asked a question to a Ruby or Rails person that was not answered.  Find a local user group and go.  The last intern that I brought on was a guy brand new to RoR but I saw him at every Ruby::AZ monthly meeting.  Sometimes the desire to learn outweighs all.

That to me are the biggest things to get going.  Oh yes, there are a million other things that can help you get rolling but these are in my opinion the biggest.

Oh yeah, why would you want to be a RoR developer?  Supply and Demand is why.  The demand for RoR dev's is insane.  If you are a RoR dev and on LinkedIn, you will get job offers daily.  Write a blog about RoR and you will get even more job offers.  The job market for RoR devs is totally all demand.

One last thing....I hated my old job and it was exactly that, a job.  If web development is your thing and you like Ruby on Rails, then I say do it.  Keep learning and get Earning!

BR

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