I dropped out of college, too. I like to say I ran out of money, and I did to an extent, but I could have made it work. Truth be told I just didn't like it. Ni

I dropped out of college, too. I like to say I ran out of money, and I did to an extent, but I could have made it work. Truth be told I just didn't like it. Nine months ago, a friend of mine suggested that I consider Rails for a new project I was thinking about. I had never even heard of Rails (remember, this was nine months ago), but I gave it a shot anyway. I started working on my app on Friday night after work, and I followed Michael Hartl's tutorial as a starting point. I had a general idea of the MVC pattern so I was good there, but up until that weekend I'd never written any kind of code other than C#. By Sunday night I had an MVP for my niche ERP that I'd been wanting to build. By the end of that month I'd fleshed it out and sold a license for $$$ to a company in my niche. I've been maintaining it ever since, I've worked as a contractor on Rails projects, and I'm happy. I'm not special. I'm not some kind of super-programmer. I couldn't even pass college-level calc. I don't want to sound like an ass, killahpriest, but I learned Rails "in a weekend" because I didn't blame my tools for my shortcomings. I didn't just follow instructions; I did my best to understand the steps I was taking. Learning new technologies is like reading books. They all have certain things in common, and if you learn those commonalities, you can pretty much breeze through just about anything. I suppose that's what they try to teach in computer science departments...