Learning Ember
Recently I've been working on a new product for my company and I decided it was a good fit for Ember. I'm just now learning Ember so it's a new endeavor for me.
I got about 60% of the way through the project and hit somewhat of a wall. I've gone about as far as the introduction tutorials I've found take you.
I've been pretty comfortable in my role as a senior or advanced rails developer for some time now. Not that I don't struggle or work on hard problems, but rails as a framework isn't getting in my way or slowing me down. I'm able to focus on my problems and not focus on the framework.
Now that I'm learning ember, I'm reminded of back when I was learning rails and how difficult and frustrating it can be to learn something new. To solve a simple problem, it requires a lot of digging and learning. But that's the price you pay for learning a framework. In a recent talk I gave about learning rails, I explained that it was difficult to learn rails (or any framework for that matter), but that the investment was well worth it.
I spent about 10-15 minutes live coding with them went through doing a quick prototype of their website. I saw some pretty impressed smiles from the crowd when they saw rails work it's magic.
I struggle with this upfront cost, but have to take some of my own medicine every now and then remember that it's worth it in the long run.