On Coding is a Medium publication of essays on software engineering, career growth, APIs, and development practices.
HN links it for its essay "Programmer Passion Considered Harmful"; commenters give no wider opinion of the publication.
I'm in the same boat, currently teaching myself ruby/rails during lunch breaks from my job in the hopes of finding a better one.
What I use personally is a Chromebook. Yes, it is Chrome OS, but I've been doing all of my tutorials and basic apps this way and I really enjoy it.
You will need to look into Crouton which establishes a chroot of a Linux environment: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton. Once you have this all set up, you can just run the Linux environment as a shell prompt. This allows you to use a text editor such as Caret (great free sublime clone that works as an extension), and test your app locally on ChromeOS.
This post was very helpful in getting started up: https://medium.com/on-coding/setup-a-complete-local-development-environment-on-your-arm-chromebook-b7fb9c14ec97
For example, within the chrome tab that includes my Linux terminal, I can run 'rails new sampleapp', then 'rails s' and open up localhost:3000 where my local rails app displays. I can modify the project directory in caret and push to git using again the Linux terminal. Sorry if I rambled on, I just really enjoy that setup on a $200 laptop.
For background info, see the original post on medium[0] and the HN comment thread[1]
[0] https://medium.com/on-coding/programmer-passion-considered-harmful-5c5d4e3a9b28
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9211214