Hello World!
With this inaugural post I wanted to celebrate crafting this small web app.
I've been working professionally as a backend rails developer for the past 5 years. Which means I haven't gotten too many chances to work on greenfield applications, especially from scratch. It's been refreshing to be totally in control of all aspects of development and move quickly on something low stakes and just fun! Though I have encountered a few snags along the way that highlight some of my weaker areas concerning software development.
I haven't touched anything frontend related in a very long time. It showed in the time line of me getting this application together. I have been working on this app on and off over the past month of unemployment. I've been enjoying time visiting friends and family and during our down time I would start banging out some commits for this blog app. I easily was able to get the whole functionality of the app done within a week (Rails 7 w/ Ruby 3.x.x).
I ended up spending 3 weeks fiddling with the css/html. I even used a gem for Tailwind CSS to expedite the frontend development and wasn't learning a whole new frontend framework like React or Angular.
I dipped my toes in deploying to a production environment via the cloud hosting product Render and hosting images in a AWS S3 bucket. I am not 100% on these tools yet but it has been interesting starting to learn how to use these products for a small project. I have found the support for Render to be pretty great so far and AWS to be a little more opaque. I definitely am interested in learning how to scale with these products since I had worked for an already company that had scaled. I don't think I will have a large enough use case for a web app anytime soon though.
Overall this application is fairly simple and straight forward. During my career break I wanted to keep my momentum up for coding so this was a nice way to keep myself going while creating a way to share about my time aboard with friends and family.
Fun Fact: The image above was my test image for the development of this blog. It's the Chris Ethridge nudie suit from the Flying Burrito Bros that I drew. It was missing for some 50 years and only recently did we recover it.
With this inaugural post I wanted to celebrate crafting this small web app.
I've been working professionally as a backend rails developer for the past 5 years. Which means I haven't gotten too many chances to work on greenfield applications, especially from scratch. It's been refreshing to be totally in control of all aspects of development and move quickly on something low stakes and just fun! Though I have encountered a few snags along the way that highlight some of my weaker areas concerning software development.
I haven't touched anything frontend related in a very long time. It showed in the time line of me getting this application together. I have been working on this app on and off over the past month of unemployment. I've been enjoying time visiting friends and family and during our down time I would start banging out some commits for this blog app. I easily was able to get the whole functionality of the app done within a week (Rails 7 w/ Ruby 3.x.x).
I ended up spending 3 weeks fiddling with the css/html. I even used a gem for Tailwind CSS to expedite the frontend development and wasn't learning a whole new frontend framework like React or Angular.
I dipped my toes in deploying to a production environment via the cloud hosting product Render and hosting images in a AWS S3 bucket. I am not 100% on these tools yet but it has been interesting starting to learn how to use these products for a small project. I have found the support for Render to be pretty great so far and AWS to be a little more opaque. I definitely am interested in learning how to scale with these products since I had worked for an already company that had scaled. I don't think I will have a large enough use case for a web app anytime soon though.
Overall this application is fairly simple and straight forward. During my career break I wanted to keep my momentum up for coding so this was a nice way to keep myself going while creating a way to share about my time aboard with friends and family.
Fun Fact: The image above was my test image for the development of this blog. It's the Chris Ethridge nudie suit from the Flying Burrito Bros that I drew. It was missing for some 50 years and only recently did we recover it.