It’s been a couple of days since the recent PhRUG August meetup. It was the first ever meetup that I have organized as the new boss for the Philippine Ruby Users Group. This post isn’t about bragging. I just wanted to share how my journey with Ruby has been very surreal to me.
9 months ago, I barely knew anything about Rails or Ruby. I was just some kid who recently got out of college and trying to find his way into the industry. I was a Java developer who is trying to be a great web developer. I was having a hard time because the resources for learning are really scarce. I spent most of my days finding my way across tens or hundreds of outdated and badly written tutorials and documentation about web development in Java.
By some chance, I got invited to go to the first Startup Weekend Manila. During the event, I found myself in a table full of Ruby developers. It was weird because that was my first time talking to developers who make their living out of a technology that I never heard of during college. They got me interested enough to try out Ruby on Rails, so after the event, I did.
I fell in love in an instant the moment I tried Ruby on Rails. It felt very natural to me and it made me feel at home. The first couple of months were really rough because it was completely new to me, but I kept at it. Luckily, through the connections I’ve made from the time I spent going to meetups and events, I managed to land a Ruby on Rails position. I was finally making a living out of what I’ve learned in just a couple of months.
Fast forward to now, I was recently appointed to take charge of the local Ruby community. I’m guessing this is because of the fact that I’m very active in the IT community. Nonetheless, this is a very big deal for me. I never would have thought that I would end up where I am right now if you ask me a year ago where I think I was going.
One thing I’ve learned from this experience is to always go out of your comfort zone to try new things. A lot of opportunities will show up if you do.