Friday was Rubyday.
On Thursday, Zach and I had banged out about a third of the Codecademy Ruby class. It was a good primer on Ruby syntax and basic usage, and I'll be completing it this week. But we wanted to get a little web dev practice in, and so on Friday we went through the "Getting Started with Rails" tutorial on RailsGuides.
The tutorial is great. My method is to hand-type (not copy/paste) every section of code. I keep two BASH terminal windows open and got the Sublime Text command line tool running so I can quickly create files and edit them without touching my mouse. There were a few anomalies in the tutorial that I had a little trouble with, but googling solved them in short order (It seems that the guide is written for Ruby 1.9.3, and the syntax for 2.0.0 requires a few changes).
By the end of the day, I had created a simple blog app and was hosting it locally. I should note that I don't totally understand the structure of all of what I did, but I got a bit of debugging in, and just typing the entire thing out really did help develop a basic feel for the framework. I think it's also worthwhile to go through simple exercises like this, just to understand how little you know about the basic tools (e.g. blogs) that you get used to using on a daily basis.
The net effect of the week: Every week should be like this. Which is to say, every week is hustle week.
Of course, shit will get in the way. This week I need to be out of town for a couple days, and that'll inevitably throw me off a bit. But I will finish the Codecademy Ruby class. And I will make progress on my seatpost project, and I will move on to the Ruby On Rails Tutorial book. This last one is the most significant of the three, but I would hope to complete it in a matter of a week.
:Sigh:
You know, for three years I worked alone building bikes. It was an incredibly lonely, frustrating time of my life, and in the end I allowed those factors to prevent me from learning all the relevant lessons that were available to me. I didn't hustle hard enough; I had a hard time learning things quickly enough. I'm learning more quickly now, and hustling harder. And though the burn will remain slow for a while, I'm betting that the blaze that results will be quite a bit more satisfying.