it's just a title. titles don't mean anything. I've known VPs who worked for directors and vice versa. if you work for someone and they give you the title software engineer, then i guess you're an engineer. If you work for yourself, you can give yourself whatever title you want. I like Czar of North America. Just get stuff done and/or make money. don't worry about titles or labels.
i also came out of a non-CS background. I don't recommend just looking at open source code. That would be like watching someone skiing to try to become a better skier. The only way to get better at coding is by writing code. You want to get into a situation with a more experienced programmer who can mentor you when you get stuck and review your code.
I definitely agree about diving into development as the best source of mastering programming, and it's obviously my main method of learning; my question was not intended to come off as an avoidance of hands-on learning, but rather a way to find additional means to accelerate my learning. I have found extensive tutorials online, but they are both redundant and typically aimed at the fundamentals of rails. I constantly run into the advice of "read through code/documentation" but rarely am pointed in the direction of useful repositories to do this. After sifting through github for a bit, I found no easy way to figure out good codebases to read through.
I think reading through code is a really valuable supplement to the learning process, especially when dealing with a framework like rails which is so heavily convention based. I find reading through code to be the quickest way of exposing myself to the standard idioms of rails based development.
This is a great question. I'm in basically the same position as you - no formal cs background but learning RoR and looking for resources to help me take it to the next level in terms of my coding and development skills.
Have you heard of jumpstartlabs? They have an awesome series of tutorials on their site covering stuff like common design patterns to use and how to use workers for background jobs etc.
