Building My First Web App

So, I got tired of my current job really fast, and something inside me just kept pushing me to go back to coding. My job was pretty boring, and drove me nuts, so I started taking out time to learn how to code from scratch. The first problem I faced was a lack of drive. While in school, the drive was pretty simple, I needed to get As’ in courses. I learnt to solve probems in hours that took people a week to solve. I did my final year project in two weeks, under intense pressure and was impressed with myself. Then it happened, I finished my course work, and all the good grades targets ended. I started looking for projects to do, with the energy that came with doing a large project in two weeks, tried applying for jobs, and the likes, but there really wasn’t any drive. I mean, I coud do jobs and get paid for them, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do them. Days rolled by, and I tried to learn some languages (actually to improve on my project development language), got ebooks, skimmed through them and dropped them aside totally.

Then, I got a job offer, attended interviews, and eventually got the job. But with just one single twist, wasn’t just what I wanted, but I took it anyway. It beat sitting at home doing virtually nothing. Spent like a month looking forward to the job, doing my best to supress my anxiety, and you know look cool. Started soon after, and the job looked nice, and I started telling people, ‘Hey, I’m a …’, feeling happy with myself. Then a month rolled by, and I had my first real task, and the going nuts part started.

Long story short, I knew I had to go back to code, it kept calling out to me, and so I started with C# technologies which was what my firm uses, hoping to switch to a development role later on, but mehn, it just didn’t work for me. I tried different approaches, got far on one, and at some point, I knew I had to switch if I needed to progress, so I moved to Ruby on Rails. Took me a while to get the hang of Ruby, and I loved the language. Didn’t take too long to move into Rails, using Michael Hartl’s book, and it was fun learning what I could do with the language.

Till that time came, I finished the book, and had to start working on an actual project. Didn’t take me a long time to come up with something I wanted to work on (had a challenge in my CDS group I wanted to fix). Initially, was only meant to be used by me, I mean, it was my first app, till I started seeing ways it could be made open to the general public. So, I drafted out some initial functionalities, and jumped straight into work. And it wasn’t what I expected it to be. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but didn’t expect what I encountered. I started running into problems that could take me a whole day to solve, sometimes more, and they drove me crazy. To make matters worse, some of the solutions I would see were just too advanced for my current level, and I usually wondered if the people that posted them understood that newbies like me would eventually read them. Didn’t really know much people into Rails around me, so I was just on my own. But, I always found a way around them, which usually made me happy, no matter how depressed I’d become while trying to fix it.

Was on that cycle for like a month, then I sat back, and looked at my app one particular day, and I was like WTF! Like, was this all I could do? I think this happened when I had to show my bestfriend the app. Most of the core functionalities were in place, it just didn’t look nice. So I started modifying it. Pushed to Heroku, and saw how it looked on my phone, and it was horrifying, the perfomance was top notch really, but it looked horrible. But I kept pushing, till I got it to look a little nicer.

To be honest, I almost gave up at different points, but I kept telling myself to move on. Even if I switched languages, none was problem free, and I would possibly meet more challenges. So, I’ll keep pushing on. I mean, nobody became a Rails ninja in 3 months. I’ll get there eventually. By the way, the app is currently in alpha, and will be released sometime next year.