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.

Also, the project is open source so you can contribute to help improve the tutorials: http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com