6 in 6 Challenge

3 min readMar 12, 2015

6 weeks tour to learn Meteor.js by building 6 apps

I don’t want to be programmer. I just want to make stuff that works.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m just trying to say that programming is not my passion. Making things that solve problems is my passion. For almost a year and half I’ve dreamed of being able to take an idea and implement it in less time possible to test its potential.

I started tweaking with PHP and Python at first, but it was too complex and difficult for me, having none technical skills at that time. Following tutorials let me build some simple stuff, but I had no idea what to do, when I wanted to implement something on my own. I somehow always gave up, when things got harder.

As Paul Graham said — Knowing how to code is really empowering. When you have an idea, you’ll be able to implement it quickly. In spite of thinking “That’s interesting idea”, you can think instead “That’s an interesting idea. I’ll try to build an initial version tonight.” It’s really a big advantage.

It’s okay to be underground with idea validation in the beginning, but from that point on, you have to move fast. For example, I created a ghetto version of tinder for digital nomads using Typeform(no referral link, I just love using it), to make meeting with people of similar interests in the new city easier. I got first ‘signups’, but I wasn’t able to further developed it on my own, because of my lack of programming skills.

After complaining about this to my friend Sam, who is working on GoDiscover, he showed me Meteor. I gave it a shot during nights on winter vacations and it turned out to be a really powerful thing and still simple to use. You only need basic understanding of the trio — HTML, CSS and JavaScript and you can build simple and elegant real-time applications and deploy just in few seconds.

Okay, back to original point…

After I’ve read JavaScript & jQuery book and first Meteor tutorials, I felt like learning only a little, so I asked my friend for an advice, which turned out to be — “Forget doing only tutorials and just try to build things. When you got stuck, google or stackoverflow (it’s a verb now) it and repeat.” Probably this sounds really obvious to you, but it really wasn’t obvious to me. Then I stumbled upon popular post on How to learn Rails by building simple web apps and decided to challenge myself to do the same.

Over next 6 weeks, each week I’m going to build a new web application and write or record a step by step tutorial how I build each weeks app.

{ Each week I’m gonna update this post, with the link to the new tutorial}