It all began on a cold winter night in a year of 1878, when something absolutely unexpected happened. What exactly it was I don’t even know, but don’t you worry, I won’t be telling you about that story…

I will tell you about a little boy, who was sowing seeds for his first apple tree….well, not really, but something like that. Everything is much more general and simple.

It all started 7 weeks ago when my web development bootcamp began. I was watering this plan for the last half of a year and finally it started. 6 weeks flew with the speed of sound and I built the basis for my first web project and deployed it online. There’s nothing special yet, but I’m feeling proud. It’s skydivepages.herokuapp.com.

The website in progress and the main application on it is version of a skydiving logbook, which is usually expressed in printed way and serves documentation and logging purpose. To prove your currency at any new dropzone where a skydiver is going to jump first time or to obtain a new sport or professional rating and validate his/her experience with it.

The paper way is still resemblance of a last century standard for documents and any kind of physical evidences, but we all know that it’s not anymore convenient and very limited in features….My goal was and still remains to replicate basic features of a regular log book, as to be able to log in jumps, their technical details (exit altitude, equipment, aircraft, freefall delay, etc) along with something what emotionally valuable to us as photographs and video that we all take with little go pros and cameras alike.

I have been given time limited by 7 days but there were no way someone could limit my dreams. And ultimate goal was set to be able to upload pictures from user’s computer and be able to sign other user’s jumps with their finger using touchpad or screen of their computing devices.

I started out the project with building basic CRUD application, because that was what I knew how to do and had good example of it presented by instructors. Since it was my very first web application it has taken a decent amount of time to have it up and running, due to myriad of Rails errors type of “undefined Method Error” and so on. Primarily due to errors in links. I tried to use mostly link helpers and they gave me a hard time. Especially delete ones. They look like this now:

<%= button_to “Delete this picture”, user_jump_picture_path(@user, @jump, @picture), method: :delete, data: { confirm: “Are you sure?”} %>

They meant to be helping, but to determine what’s the correct path prefix and what instance variables I had to add, wasn’t easy. In this particular example you see already deeply nested routes for “delete picture” button. The picture in this case belongs to a jump record, that belongs to a user.

I applied authorization and authentication features only after major part was working causing all routes to change. And I was quiet disappointed seeing picture like this at first time:

But I had no choice and set to work. And still I have yet to get rid of some unused routes, that “resources” method has given to me.

The most challenging part in the project for me is mostly emotional part. I am a slow learner as I remember myself (oh well, as Brian Tracy teaches in his book “Accelerated Learning Techniques” — I must always repeat to myself: “I learn everything easily well” and the more I repeat it, the better I program my central neuron system) and big and difficult exercises like this have been intimidating me all the time. And the worst part of it, I began to think wrong thoughts such as: “I won’t make it on it on time”, “I’ll be the only one who won’t make it on time”, “I always fail” etc….And all the time I had to hold myself and remind that I’m a programmer now and have to be able program not only computer, but my brain as well and keep confidence and strong belief in success.