Why I'm learning Ruby on Rails and blogging about it

I first heard about Ruby on Rails about a year or two ago at an online work forum.
this guy gave a presentation on how he was earning 66$ an hour at the time coding ROR apps and having a ball. He left his full time job and was freelancing full time. He has since increased his rate and has gone on to even greater success.

At the time, I didn't want to be a wagonist and just follow the money. My big mistake. I did fool around with rails a bit but it was very technical and hard to install configure so I gave up.

Earlier this year another local web dev gave a heads up on a local developer forum saying that we should learn rails asap as he will be looking to hire in a few months. So said so done. he did come back a few months later looking for local devs to work and couldn't find any. another missed opportunity.

A couple days ago I went to a twitter Bootstrap training and met another ROR developer and I decided then and there to learn this thing and just get it over with.

So, I'm making it public and I'm committing to learning rails and documenting what I'm learning, where I am learning it from and what I have done with it.

I'm committing to 3 hours a day minimum 7 days a week, roughly 20 or more hours a week. I would really like to give 40 hours or more a week. But I'll start with 20 hours  and document how much I actually give. I can give 3-4 hours a day in the evenings and will aim to do 5-6 hours on weekends. I could create a chain at chains.cc to document my progress.

My goals are to get a junior ROR programmer position in 6 months. So by Feb 1, 2014, I will be gainfully employed as a full time ROR developer.

Really what I want to do is learn rails, build a few real world apps, build a portfolio on github and heroku, tackle some common problems, then start bidding for jobs on online work sites and looking for work on CL and other online sites. Aim for 20-25$ an hour and then steadily increase my rates as I get some more experience. Once I have sufficient online experience then I could apply to work in a traditional work environment if I see the need to.