It seems like anytime I start work on another part of my Rails app, I have to spend a long time fixing something else that’s not working. Mostly because I have no clue what’s going on within the Rails framework, and half the time I spend digging around to find the source of the error. It doesn’t help that I’m learning Ruby at the same time too.

I think PHP spoiled me. Whenever there was an error, it was right in my face and I could hunt it down quickly with no problem. And if I didn’t know the solution, there was always php.net or a wealth of discussions to read through. The Rails community is great, but for whatever reason I’m finding it harder to find answers. And once I do get it working, I rarely have done it the “correct” way. 

I definitely developed some bad habits writing PHP. Never used a versioning system, worked directly on the server, never wrote tests, never even used the command line for anything. So I’m having to update myself on all of that at the same time. Pretty overwhelming.

Maybe it would be better if I were just doing Ruby, but throw Rails on top and I get totally lost. There’s so many moving parts involved that most of the time I feel like I shouldn’t even try to solve a problem myself, I should just look for how someone else did it. That takes a lot of the enjoyment of programming away for me.

Anyway, I can still see how Rails will be great once I understand it all better, but right at the moment it’s killin me.

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