It took a little longer than expected, but I finished the Complete Ruby on Rails Developer Course on Udemy. Full disclosure though: I did not complete the optional final project.

Through the course, I completed three rails projects, and I would definitely recommend the course to anyone starting out with rails as it guides you through the whole process, including deployment.

Despite following along and coding along with the lectures, I started getting error messages. The course didn’t provide any in-progress examples of the code to reference, so while I did attempt to de-bug for about an hour, I decided to cut my losses, stop coding, and just watch the remaining videos. Yes, I could have spent a week reading documentation, but I decided that it would be a better use of my time to simply move on. Technology moves fast, and that can make it very difficult to keep courses up to date.

The sunk cost fallacy is something we’re faced with a lot- that is, the more we invest in something (emotionally, and time-wise in this case) the harder it is to give it up. At first, I struggled with the idea of not completing the project, but the truth is that sometimes it’s better to stop what you’re doing and move on. At this stage, it simply isn’t necessary for me to become an expert in rails- what will serve me better is a more broad understanding of how to build an app. It’s entirely possible that I will never again be working with that same combination of services and gems!

The course that I finished was good, but it was time for me to move on to a different course, which I’ve already started!

Also- I have a mini-rant about the $1.30 AWS charged me- why?? I still don’t know why they charged me!