I've had a very long absence from Ruby. As with all of my other skills, I seem to pick things up with unnatural fanaticism and then lose steam quickly.
Ruby has been one of the things that I've picked up and put back down many times over a number of years. But I crave it.. and I've begun itching to do problem solving in Ruby when I hear about problems unrelated to my current focuses. I'm very happy about that.
A while back I asked here about motivating a ruby newbie, methods for learning, ways to attack project problems, etc. I got a lot of constructive feedback, much of which didn't make clear sense then, but given time and experimentation a lot of it sunk in.
I seem to be developing habits. Some of them I suspect are bad and I'll have to lose them, but I think they're still an important starting point. I search before I ask. I wait a day before getting frustrated and answers just come to me. I'm slow and deliberate, and I'll work on comments or pseudocode when I lose steam. All good starting points.
I wanted to give a quick thanks for the community. I just spent a lot of time laughing aloud while reading through some recent posts. =)