[apapli]

I'm a sales guy first and foremost, and develop for fun on evenings and weekends when I have some spare time after my child had gone to bed. 90% for fun, 10% for a small side income.

For what it is worth I taught myself Ruby on Rails and MySQL, however in hindsight I probably should have learned php / MySQL as it seems more prevalent, less "hipster.js" and easier to set up basic dev and prod environments.

I still don't fully understand Ajax or JavaScript, however they are "nice to have's" in my book as they improve the UX, but I can still make an application work without them.

An alternative is to learn how to customise a commercial application. Deluge for Zoho is pretty easy (and appears to be based on php), and Shopify's Liquid is good too (that's based on ruby). I found them both easy to learn.

Hope that helps!