I&#x27;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.<p>For what it is worth I taught myself Ruby on Rails and MySQL, however in hindsight I probably should have learned php &#x2F; MySQL as it seems more prevalent, less &quot;hipster.js&quot; and easier to set up basic dev and prod environments.<p>I still don&#x27;t fully understand Ajax or JavaScript, however they are &quot;nice to have&#x27;s&quot; in my book as they improve the UX, but I can still make an application work without them.<p>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&#x27;s Liquid is good too (that&#x27;s based on ruby). I found them both easy to learn.<p>Hope that helps!