Saturday, November 30, 2013

The Depot -- My plan for world domination

It is Saturday, and I'm on Thanksgiving break from Launch Academy.  I took Thursday and Friday completely off; and didn't look at a single line of code.  48 hours is too long to be away from Ruby, I'm in love with the language and I'm in love with learning.
  My breakable toy is a notepad, which I talk about in detail in a previous blog post.  However, my real expertise is e-commerce.  In a previous life, the life before committing 100+ hours a week to learning ruby and rails, I owned a company that built extensions and did custom development for the Magento platform.  I helped a lot of businesses ( 300+ ) take their online stores to the next level.  I managed projects ranging from installing an extension all the way to integrating a custom developed ERP into Magento with multi retail store support using geolocating API's like MaxMind and, later in the project, if (navigator.geolocation) { }, switched to HTML5 geolocation for more accurate results.
  My thought process is that I'd like to build a lot of open source extensions for the spree e-com framework, to give back to the community and to help improve my skill set at the same time.  To get to that point, though, I need to take a step back and focus on learning rails.  The program at Launch Academy is only 10 weeks so in order to build two breakable toys I'm going to need to stay ahead of the assignment workload.
  I've picked up Agile Web Development With Rails 4 and I will start building a simple e-commerce system in rails today called "The Depot". I'm already 150 pages in and I finally get to start building the application in the book.  I plan to challenge myself by starting the application with zurb foundation so that I can make it look nice.  Throughout the process of building this application, I'll make a few blog posts with hurdles I run into or things I've accomplished that are outside the scope of the book.
  After I finish the ecommerce application, I'm going to dive straight into spree and start contributing.  Already at first glance, I see a lot of room for improvement when comparing spree to a more established, better funded alternative such as Magento.

Thanks for taking the time to read my rants.  I like to blog now to keep my thoughts organized, and perhaps someday, I'll make my freshman college english professor proud by taking the time to write well thought out paragraphs.  Until then, though, I'm back to coding!






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