I wish I'd had this post a couple years ago. I got into my current job by starting as a contractor, helping a friend out in an emergency situation. I've done PHP for over a decade, but had never written Ruby beyond some basic CLI scripts! I spent a few days learning how Rails works, and then how Heroku works (ephemeral filesystems were a new idea to me at the time), and finally got it all together. I also wish I'd put something like this together based on what I went through, but I'm glad this exists for others.