In the last two weeks I had decided to learn Rails. I’ve always had the resources to learn, but I’ve always found something else distracting to do. In meeting with other local developers at the Eugene, Oregon Web Developer Meetup (very creative name) I talked with at least three Rails developers with jobs developing in Rails locally. This inspired me to learn.

Yet again I found myself distracted by something shiny and less boring: Padrino, a Rails substitute built on my favorite microframework Sinatra. After failing to get it to work (an issue with Bundle I still haven’t figured out) I decided to check out the 201mb screencast tutorial. Eleven seconds into the screencast I realized how little I knew about web development and Ruby.

This new insight prompted me to review over my projects and progress. I found that I had been working on learning Ruby for the last 6..7 months and that all of my projects remain unfinished. There are a lot of areas in Ruby that I don’t understand or use like metaprogramming. A lot of the unique syntax still escapes me.

This whole thing coupled with the iPad release (and my purchase of one) has made me consider if I even want to do web development. There are so many factors to deal with when developing on the web. I have to know HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the RESTful web interface. All of these parts fit together to make mediocre apps most of the time.