My web development history

I started learning by learning front-end development. I honestly found CSS to be infuriating. I’m certain I could put more time in and learn properly, but after six months and still only managing to create basic layouts, I was happy to say I know the principles involved and leave it there. I learned a bit about HTML5, CSS3, JS and jQuery, and a general front-end workflow, including working from PSDs. I am terrible at design and front-end dev practically however.

I then moved on to back-end development. I started by looking at PHP, but I didn’t find it very friendly, and honestly, it just has very ugly syntax. I looked at Python and Ruby because they have much nicer syntax. I started with Python and tried typing up a few code examples, and made a VAT calculator, but Python was not for me. Ruby looked nice and I enjoyed what I did there, but some programming concepts discussed in the books I bought were above me.

To remedy this, I started CS50x online, and completed three weeks of lectures and coursework. I stopped this course because of time commitments and because I found it overkill for what I wanted to do. I am certain I will come back to this and complete it, because what I did learn was very useful. I need to get a better grounding in maths first however, as my maths is as a very basic level. Imagine you didn’t learn any math in high school, and you are close to where my maths is.

Finally, I moved back into Ruby, and I’ve found this to be the easiest language to read and understand, so just jumped in with both feet.

Accountables

This is the first thing I created. It’s an accountability tracker. The end-goal is to allow users to sign up and track progress on a task or goal, as well as set up a partner who is doing the same. The key feature will be that users with a partner will get an email to let them know when their partner has completed their task for the day, and will also get an email if their partner does not complete teir task for a day.

I originally started this so that members of the Seanwes community could keep each other accountable across timezones for early wake, daily write (EWDW), where individuals wake up early in order to complete a daily writing practice. When they are up eaely, they will text their accountability partner “FOTF” (feet on the floor). This is hard if your accountability partner is abroad, or in a different timezone. With Accountables, your partner gets an email instead, so they can check it when they wake up, and you can keep an eye on each other’s progress.

The front-end here is very rudimental, and quite ugly. I’ll probably look for help to make this nicer when it is feature complete.

Pomodoro

As mentioned before, I’m terrible at design, and front-end development. I really like playing with the GNU/Linux and the command line, so I figured, why not learn how to make command line apps with Ruby? The entire UI is text!

I bought a book on building command-line apps with Ruby and just started a chapter one and moved on with the examples in the book. At chapter 3, I decided I wanted to follow the pomodoro protocol while working through the material. I was about to just quickly install an app on my phone, but then I thought about it. I can just make this myself on the command line! So I did.

The whole thing took me about two hours to get from idea to deploying an MVP on GitHub. As soon as it was deployed, I opened a few issues to represent my to do list. I think the reason it took as long as it did was because I was working out how to get the app to emit a noise when the countdown reached zero. Turns out my laptop simply does not emit system noises, so I just used a very simple media player and evoked a shell command to play a small mp3 using backticks.

Havamal

The Havamal is an ancient Norse Eddic poem. The ‘philosophy of the Vikings’ shows another side to stereotypical Norsemen raping and pillaging barbarians that we are used to seeing.

I picked up a copy of this when I went to Oslo with a friend at the start of last year. I really like reading it and wanted to set something up that would send me a verse from this book each day. Fortunately, the text is in the public domain so I found a less-flowery translation and set this up.

At the moment, all this does is show a random verse on every page refresh. I’ll be working on this over time to add the required functionality. This isn’t going to be very difficult work, it’s stuff I’ve not done before so may take me some time to get right.

City Cam Repo

I was looking for ideas for small projects I could start and complete in a few days. I searched Twitter for the phrase “I wish there was a website that”. One of the results was “I wish there was a website where you can watch building and traffic cameras in major cities”, so I built it.

You can read this blog post to find out how this was built.

Next?

Check out this page to see the ideas I have for small projects in the future.