Having done quite a bit last week my initial plan was to wait till the next weekend or for a slower day or free evening to continue and finish my Rails tutorial. However couldn’t hold back and opened up my Rails Server on Monday itself.
Monday
My first task was to add images to my Pins and being on heroku (which doesn’t support image storage) redirect and use Amazon S3 for images.
That wasn’t so difficult and in less than an hour has my AWS Account setup, bucket created and permissions all registered on Heroku.
Then I hit a wall. It seems that AWS acts differently for non US users! Had to tinker around with PaperClip configuration settings, point it to the right endpoint and coax it to make it work.
Amazing … I was solving runtime issues as I came along.
The other thing I discovered is that Heroku is very temperamental. Atleast for free users. Perhaps it wanted me to migrate to the paid accounts?
Some of the other cool things I learned was JQuery Masonry for aligning my Pins and CoffeeScript. Now my App was starting to look really cool!
Tuesday
Was difficult to get any coding done on Tue doe to team calls and our 12 week Startup Education – Guru Program at CASS Business School. This weeks subject was Big Business meets Startups. Where a Big Business and a B2B Startup shared their experiences.
Wednesday
Was game on! Back to the training and finishing all the final touch ups to get the App full functional. And here is the final product in all its glory! I feel like a proud Dad 🙂
Learnings
One of the challenges I faced working through the week was the need from other team members. Although we had a team structure was in place this constant interruption would never allow anyone to focus and learn a new subject or any sort of deeper thought processes.
Keeping the mind clear and focused. Is really tough. The concept of empty minds is at the core of Zen and only now can I fully appreciate and understand its implications.
I did a few simple things – shut off my Mobile, Emails, Yammer chat and all external disturbances for couple of hours at a time. Went through my training and then popped back in to see how things were progressing. I’m pleased to say this kind of worked. If you let people communicate and collaborate they find ways to get things done. This was also a lesson for me to let go and not try to control everything.
So what next?
Is this the end of my Hackathon and should I slow down to the pace of the festive season and crappy TV reruns, eat-as-much-as you can dinners, shop till you drop ? Actually No ! This is the beginning .. I have now decided to build a full fledged Web App to be used by my team & me to make our everyday work a bit easier. We are a small business and understand the challenges faced by many such small businesses. If its usable and we do find it makes us more productive who knows … in a few months perhaps I could launch it as a full fledged Product! So here begins my next journey in creating a Web App that would help my team and me collaborate and be more effective on a day to day. Here’s the first step to me going back to what I love the most … building Products 🙂
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