tumes

Hi HN. After about three years of working as a professional chemist I decided that while I like the work, I don't find it particularly stimulating. Consequently, about six months ago a good developer friend of mine essentially mentored me into learning a bit about Ruby and Rails. Up until that point all I had had was a teenage flirtation with web development in the late 90s and a semester of C++ in college rolled into my math minor.

Flash forward to now, six months after starting to learn and I feel I know just enough that I can work my way through just about any problem I run in to, though with a fair amount of head bumping. I'm developing a small bookkeeping app for work and I've successfully launched a silly little project (amitwitterfamous.com, currently down in the midst of the great AWS outage of '11).

My question is, where do I go from here? I'm coding and learning every day, but I don't know where or how to take the next step. Were any of you in a similar position? What were your early experiences?