failing like never before

I looked at my site's URL today and wondered why I chose the domain name “42gems,” and for the life of me I couldn't seem to remember why. Before I go any further, I'd like to describe how and why this site came about.

During the summer of '06, before I started my senior year in high school, I was an intern at Intel Corporation. I worked in Technology Automations and Manageability Services, a subgroup of IT. Essentially, my job was to design web applications. This of course, required that I know some sort of server-side scripting language. My manager gave me two choices, Microsoft .NET or Ruby on Rails. During that time, I knew very little about web programming, my programming experience consisted solely of c/c++, Javascript, and some HTML and CSS (of course, neither HTML or CSS are really programming languages, but I digress). However, even when I was sixteen I still had a dislike for Windows, so I chose Rails over .NET.