Tue, 23 April, 2024

I've been writing a comprehensive guide — 'Building Your First Rails App,' which is tailored for beginners eager to develop their first Ruby app. Currently, the manuscript spans over 3,000 words, and I'm only a quarter of the way through. Given that it may potentially reach 10,000 words, I'm pondering whether this content is best suited as an in-depth essay, a mini-book, or even a full book.

In writing this tutorial, I've adopted a first-principles approach, which sets it apart from many other tutorials that often target more experienced developers (especially the Ruby official docs). These can be overwhelming for novices encountering Ruby Rails code for the first time. My focus has been on clarity and simplicity, ensuring that I thoroughly explain even the most basic concepts that seasoned programmers might overlook.

Sat, 13 April, 2024

Falling in love with running again

I've been enjoying the runs in and around London. Have been tracking them actively on Strava, along with the occasional group runs through Strava communities. Prepping for a half-marathon in May.

Virtual Bookshelf

I've always dreamt of having a virtual bookshelf of all my previous readings/book notes. My first attempt at creating this was through a Notion second brain five years back consisting of all my book notes back then. Recently, I came across this react bookshelf component from Ahmad Majumdar on Twitter. I then forked this code and added this section on my website.

I now have a dedicated 'books' page where I compile most of my book notes. It's live, and it's still a work-in-progress. Yet to transfer all my book notes from Readwise.

Niche Meetups

Have been participating in various niche interest-based meetups. To name a few, you have Through the Glass Darkly which is a round-house of philosophy, history, and social science nerds. The Future of Code meetup organised by Maggie Appleton diving deep into speculative futures through tech. Small Bets is featuring weekly online lectures centered around solopreneurship and the philosophy of 'small bets'. I'm also joining the No Code Network Meetup next week at Gilray House, London!

Job Board for Tech Unicorns

Design engineering is having its renaissance right now. It’s the golden age of developers who also understand design. Companies have started to invest in craft. They are not viewing craft as a sacrifice on velocity (anymore). It’s now an investment in quality.

The old guard is being replaced by the new. You no longer have confusing roles and titles such as webmaster/UX unicorn/engineer.

Software artisan? Designeer? Builder? UX engineer? The lines between design and code are getting blurred. All roles merge into one—design engineer

These tech unicorns, as the name suggests, are not mythical fictional creatures. They are living, breathing human beings with design and engineering chops.

Rohit and I are building a job board for design-engineers here. We are planning to launch this sometime soon once we have a solid marketing strategy in place.

Founder/Hacker course

For the past six months, I've been learning Ruby on Rails in an on-and-off fashion. I've been following my own curriculum online, learning tips and tricks to eventually hack a SaaS all on my own. I've found great joy in expressing myself through internet projects and have collaborated with many great developers previously. This is my technical generalist curriculum so far:

Michael Hartl's Learn Enough to be Dangerous series (I've taken it step by step here, right from git, bash, text editors to then venture into Ruby, and then Ruby on Rails)
Ryan Kulp's Founder/Hacker course. Completed two of his courses. The 24 Hour MVP as well as the Fundamentals 101 course. Ryan has previously sold various software startups and had picked up Rails coming from a non-technical background. He covers a lot of ground on hacking your way through code (even if you don't completely understand it)