I've experienced the same insights after learning most of my web dev skills from that "yucky ducky" framework you mentioned - Ruby on Rails. The affordances and speed gains you get from things like Rails or .NET MVC are definitely advantageous, but they definitely give you a lot of "magic" to really abstract what's going on. I've found that learning the bare metal technologies that power something such as Rails help me to be a more efficient coder...it's too bad that many people never take that next step and are happy to take on the technical debt and overhead of all that "magic" much too easily. Happy Coding!

Glad to hear you've had such a good response...hopefully you found some good advice along the way! Anyways...the beauty of many of the sites I mentioned, is that you can really get a taste of a lot of languages to see what interests you. While most of what I mentioned is web/mobile focused, there's quite a bit of material on Treehouse that isn't. Eventually you'll want to focus in, but I initially dabbled with PHP, Python, Go and others before focusing in on Ruby & Javascript. I often hear folks say HTML and CSS aren't programming languages (usually with a derogatory tone), and although technically true, IMHO understanding them is just as important (if not more so) in the context of modern web programming than any scripting language. I think HTML/CSS/Javascript is a great combo if you want to get into automation for Google "Work" products, and it will serve you well beyond that arena as well. That's funny you mention the programming/composition paradigm (my music degree concentration was composition), and I'd agree that they're definitely correlated! Maybe you could equate your choice of language to the "orchestration"...

There are a wealth of online courses for learning web development, both free and paid. I'd definitely recommend you get really comfortable with HTML and some CSS, and then start learning Javascript. Javascript is the language of web browsers (and now many servers, too), so its one of the most pervasive languages around, and its works on every platform (Windows, Apple, Linux, iOS, Android, etc. etc. etc.). My personal favorites are:

Free* Code Academy

• Thinkful Online Learning
• General Assembly Dash
  Paid* Treehouse (beginner friendly)
• Code School (geared towards folks familiar with basic concepts)

Anyways, despite the cost - the paid sites are well worth the money for the advanced concepts and the depth of learning they provide, and are a huge factor in why I'm a professional web developer today (despite having a degree in Music, :laugh: ). In fact, after getting hired at my current company, I convinced them to invest in Code School for our team and the other devs love it! (We just renewed for another year). Anyways, best of luck to you in your search for greener pastures!