Oh man three20. I was freshly hired at my first dev job at a startup as a self-taught rails dev. I like to learn and was open to doing more, so they had me star

Oh man three20. I was freshly hired at my first dev job at a startup as a self-taught rails dev. I like to learn and was open to doing more, so they had me start to take over some of the ios dev, which heavily leveraged three20. Unless you have the same experience, you can't imagine how difficult it is to get your head around native ios development with this kitchen-sink, highly-opinionated library layered on top. I had no frame of reference for understanding ios, or three20, or even development in general really (I had done some webapps and api servers...). That was the most difficult phase of "this seems like it should be incredibly simple but I'm now a week into trying to figure it out". So frustrating. I made it out the other end, ultimately by just throwing my hands up and asking for help, then really digging into native ios first so I had a solid frame of reference of what the system was intended/designed to do, and what three20 was doing for/against you. I had a similar experience with Ruby/Rails actually (not understanding what rails did vs just ruby), and now I recognize I'm falling into that trap immediately when getting into new ecosystems. Now I try to make sure to start from the basics, and layer the complexity on only after I have a frame of reference for understanding the platform.