Hey “Business Cofounders” – Learn Rails in under a month

Backstory – I started the railstutorial.org tutorial to learn Ruby on Rails (RoR) about a year ago.  It was (and is) the hot language in the startup space.  I failed.  I failed big time.  I’ve never been too familiar with the command line and all of the error and frequent stops made me stop trying within a week.  I literally spent 10-20 hours trying to set up the ruby, rails, github, heroku environments in chapter one, and after 3 wasted days, I gave up.  I assume many non technical founders have gone through something like this before.

Earlier this week, I attended a ruby class put on by the guys at terrible labs.  Learning Ruby and having them help set up the application environment sprung me to install rails, heroku, github and attempt to learn how to code in RoR all over again.  This time, I made the right decision by asking others for help.

The guys at terrible labs helped me set up the environment for ruby.  Josh Silverman from studyegg showed me some of the awesome things rails can do and Mason Fischer from kissr.co spent way too much time helping me configure my rails environment on my ubuntu setup.

Once the terrible process of setting up an environment was finished, I started breezing through the tutorial.  I’m going through a chapter each day and plan on finishing and becoming a rails expert before Christmas. 

Advice To Business Cofounders

If you want to learn rails, ask for help in setting up your environment.  At first, I was unwilling to ask for help because I didn’t want to bother anyone and I know people have better things to do.  Ask for help.  I don’t know what it is, but Rails developers love rails and love helping other people learn how to use Rails.  The people at Terrible Labs, Mason, and Josh were more than helpful in getting me setup and I am extremely grateful to them for this.

Find some guys in your area that know Rails and ask for help.  Believe me, developers love business-minded folks who want to get their hands dirty and learn some code.  If you do this and get past chapter one in railstutorial.org, you will be able to learn rails in under a month.  I’m doing it, and you can too!