If I am really honest with myself I don't know what I'm doing just yet, but I cannot wait to be able to have some understanding of how to use this language and framework. I have had the privilege to of meeting a talented and active Rails developer named Andrew Thorp who has been willing to come along side my good man Clay and me as we are going through the process of creating a new website solution for The Ridge. His knowledge makes me jealous (and makes me feel like a simpleton, which I suppose is a good thing seeing as how I need to learn from him) but his patience and willingness to teach us has been awesome.
Clay, having a bit of an advantage over me in the coding experience world, albeit self-taught, is chomping at the bit to get rolling. Meanwhile, I am bringing up the rear on the knowledge train, but even getting to be a part of this project and getting my feet wet in the process has been a blast. Typically with projects like this I'd just provide some Photoshop documents to be coded into HTML/CSS, but it's looking like this time around I have a chance at being a more active part.
Andrew pointed us in the direction of railstutorial.org which has been a great resource for getting my brain wrapped around the MVC Framework and also brought me some rather surface level learning of OS X Terminal, git, heroku, mysql, and of course ruby. So much of this in my experience has been self-taught by scouring google for fixing things I've broken or don't know how to do, so it will be somewhat nice to have a solid foundation proper syntax, good development practice, and most valuably to have Andrew help steer us along the way. I am only through the first bit of the book, but I know it's going to get more complex and more fun from here.
I look forward to what lies ahead in this process, and I have to say it's nice to be excited about a project that has the potential for big impact at The Ridge. More to come I'm sure.