Greetings, Web Citizen

Hello! I’m Ciara — a self-taught web developer on a journey to learning Meteor.

I started learning to code in 2009 with a borrowed laptop and no clue what I was doing. It’s been a bumpy, but rewarding, road often traveled by solitary learners.

I started freelancing almost immediately, working on small paid projects in between working menial part-time jobs. I learned the basics of WordPress, and decided to learn Ruby on Rails in 2012. That summer, I found myself on Meteor.com. Like many developers, I watched the screencast in awe, feeling a rush of excitement. Meteor was the framework I was searching for! However, as a poor developer, I couldn’t invest the time needed to learn a framework still so new. I stuck with Rails, moving on to bigger and better (paying) projects.

It was summer 2013, when I finally hit my breaking point. There were all sorts of amazing projects being made with Meteor, and I couldn’t sit back and eye them enviously anymore! I found Tom Coleman and Sacha Greif’s Discover Meteor, devoured it greedily and am now going through my fourth reading. (And really, it wasn’t until my third reading that I actually felt like I understood what was going on.)

After years of perseverance, I now have a distraction-free home office (with doors!) where I spend my time learning about Meteor, browsers, the DOM, and advanced JavaScript. I’m also working on the third iteration of my side project, Mangaroon, a manga publishing platform for independent artists that I hope will be fully functional in the next few weeks.

Over the next few months, my goal is to contribute significantly to the Meteor community in any way that I can! In particular, I’m interested in helping people like myself, who have experienced the anxiety of transitioning to a new career, a new framework, and a new paradigm of development and engineering.

Trust me, I know how it feels.

Meteor truly is a wonder for beginners! With very little finagling, a junior developer can have a legit web application up and running in a few hours — with only three files! No belabored searching through cryptic directories. And when you’re comfortable, Meteor gives you the flexibility to create an application structure that works for your workflow — or that particular project. There’s no need to switch between macro- and microframeworks. Meteor can be as light or as heavy as you need it to be.

When it’s time to showcase your projects, you can deploy to Meteor’s servers for free with a custom subdomain. Get going with that portfolio!

Of course, there will undoubtedly be times when you’re going to need help learning, but even before 1.0, the Meteor community is thriving. You can get started with Discover Meteor, the Meteor documentation, Evented Mind, Meteor Tips, and you can keep up to date with the latest news with The Meteor Podcast and the Meteor YouTube channel.

Hey, you can even contact me via Twitter if you’d like. (I’m a n00b, but I’m resourceful!) At the very least I can be around for moral support.

In any case, that’s my story. I hope it’s been helpful. As I get into the groove, I’ll be writing and contributing more about my personal and professional perspectives, Meteor stuffs, and game development.

Thanks for reading!