Caveat: I don't know Rails. I've only recently started teaching myself to code/program/develop. So I guess now is a good time to start with Rails as any, eh?
8 months ago I jumped straight into working with Django/Python - one fine day, I made a list of project ideas that I've had in my head for a while and started chalking out the corresponding algos & coding them without a care about how 'bad' my code was going to look. (Yeah, I belong to the 'learn first, refine later' school of thought.)
8 months since I first started, the score is two ideas done, six more to go. Wait, scratch that, seven more to go. Wish me luck!
I can only agree. I started learning to code, because I wanted to acomplish one special thing (downloading and parsing xml from a weather-source to look at historical wether data for five places).
I started with python, learned a little bit sqlite on the way, learned about parsing files (good for understanding our devs at work better) and so on. Now I've gone on, got a little sandbox-server at work (I'm an editor) and atomated some really bad jobs at work with python. And did some funny things to make life better for our editorial team.
Yes, I am probably still writing spaghetti code, and there are a lot of things left I really like to learn, but with time comes understanding and I get better week by week.
When I look at code from 3 month ago, I get the urge to refactor it. But it works, it runs as it should and today I am more inclined to learn new things and get new things done first.
Actually, if your goal is to set up a discussion forum, then you can get away with "ignoring" the code behind Discourse (except for some YAML config files)
