Yes, it happened!

Every once in a while we have to pause, look back and try to be proud of what we have acoomplished. On my bus ride this morning, I am doing just that. For others, I might be the crazy person, who opened his laptop, only to wonder around, look through the window, seemingly lost in the views of the mountains to the West. But in my head thoughts are running around: I have now two projects live on the internet. So far none of our work was accessible by others. At most we ran applications on our laptops. Other than through localhost, nobody could see what we have been working on. That is changing now, given that we just deployed our first two applications to Heroku this week. Wohoooo!

This is definitely one thing to be proud of, however this is not the real source of my pride. Not to discredit others’ efforts, but nowadays with all the online tutorials avaialble, lot of people could hack something together and push it to the internet. So why do I feel so proud, then? Here are the two main reasons:
1. I know exactly why and how my application works:
This is a huge difference from any implementation where one would just Google and hack the details together. In the weeks prior we were building our applications the hard way: without Rails building much of the code framework for us. It was long hours of coding well spent!
2. Making progress:
My second rails app Job Tracker works much better than the first one. I am not saying this second one is perfect. I wish I could. But the fact is that it is a much stronger implementation than my first one and that is a momentum I will try to build on.

I still have a long list of potential improvements for Job Tracker, including:
- refactoring all controllers to avoid long methods,
- making sure all ActiveRecord methods are called from the models,
- increasing test coverage to cover corner cases and confirm all page details,
- further simplifying test setup with factory girl,
just to mention a few…

Starting from now on, I will have a Projects page capturing what I will be working on and serving also as my online portfolio. Please don’t hesitate to share any constructive comments regarding any of the projects as well as how to make the Project Portfolio page better. Thank you! :-)