I had written a post a few months ago, about how I learnt to code on the web, and what my inspiration was. I didn’t finish the complete story but I did promise to finish it in another article. So here it goes..
I was touching up a bit of code one night, after I had created a personal profile page for myself to show off what I had learnt to date. I was really proud about it. It had all the bells and whistles a website could have, will sharing buttons and RSS Newsletter Subscribe forms. I felt I had done everything right.. or so I thought.
I had noticed that a lot of blogs on the internet, from which I read, had a lot more than social integration. They had user registration, categorizing options, and those impressive transitions when you hover over pictures. Me, being the greedy type, wanted all those features too, and more! I wasn’t content. I knew I could outdo what I had already done. And so I set out to learn how.
I did a bit of research about these “interactive features” on websites. I was reading every type of article that had these keywords, but none of them specified exactly what I wanted to do. I researched high and low on how to implement those impressive features like user login and registering on a website. None of it really related to what I had in mind. I was frustrated.
I was exploring the Startups Section on TechCrunch, one night, as my brother had linked me an article there (he’s running a startup right now). I was just zooming down the page, until I zoop’d past a link which had the words “Learn how to code”. I immediately went up the page and clicked the link. After I had read the article, I instantly knew this was what I was looking for. It was a startup called One Month Rails which teached you how to code on a “web app framework” called Ruby on Rails, in one month.
I went on to read about web frameworks, to find out that they are web languages which are based upon other core languages, for RoR — Ruby, which help to create interactive websites, from these languages. It seems that Ruby on Rails was one of the easiest to learn, but is also extremely flexible. At this point, I knew I was given the offer to learn and create exactly what I wanted, in a month’s time, something which I thought would take months for me.
I knew I wouldn’t get an offer like this, anytime soon and so I took it and signed up for the One Month Rails course. I was a bit vary in the start, but good things were to come.
Surprisingly, I finish the course in 3 weeks, as opposed to the promised 1 month. It was structured so that it would finish in exactly a month, which 30 tutorials altogether. But I guess my eagerness to improve my skill set was what made me move a bit faster. The teacher, Mattan Griffel, was incredibly good at explaining the concepts behind the entire language, he divided the framework, into proper partitions, making the concepts easy to take in. He provided relevant links to other material and important services to have us going as soon as possible. He also created the course, in such a way, so as to have to spend as little as possible to create the application and have it working on a proper domain, which I thought was pretty nice of him. But what I thought was the most crucial to my learning was the relevant code he had provided in the shownotes, which had helped immensely as reference to my learning and understanding of the language.
By the end of the course, I had created a Pinterest replica which you can see here, which also had all the bells and whistles I was hoping for. Exactly what I had in mind, he thought us how to implement user registration into our application, along with other features, which I now know are crucial to many websites nowadays.
After the course, I went on to create more web applications which I was inspired to create, from the popular websites of today. I created cool apps, like fully functional blogs, to movie reviewing sites, to even Twitter clones!
I can now confidently say that I know how to develop web applications for the web, of any kind.
I know there’s a lot more out there, from the other research I’ve done. Like JavaScript and Python, and their frameworks too! I’ll be sure to update everything that happens around me, here on Medium.
But overall, I’m happy to know I can actually create something liable, as a website. Just that feeling, makes me confident to learn more.
Until then, Feel free to catch up with everything about my ongoing story here.
