I recently bit the bullet and bought bullettrain.co and it's awesome. Engineering at 200 miles an hour sure beats the heck of out engineering at the speed of Thomas the Tank engine. In my quest to break away from Java and dive head first into learning Rails I figured it would be best to build a quick and useful project. So this last week my after-hours hacking has been taken up with building Habit Rabbit - a habit forming/tracking web application.
Habit Rabbit doesn't punish you for breaking a 'streak', it more just measures overall how much you are keeping up for the month. I have always found that if I'm hitting my daily goals at least 80% of the time, I'm fine.
It has been very quick to build with bullet train and a great introduction to learning Rails. I have even starting developing some good habits :) I actually decided to build it because I wanted to build the habit of reaching out to people to expand my network and having lunch with someone every week and I knew without something to prompt me that I probably wouldn't. So far so good!
One of the most pleasant surprises from the whole experience was being able to make use of the light admin UI toolkit (light.pinsupreme.com) that comes with it. I'm not a designer and certainly not a CSS guru and my ability to think visually is somewhat lacking. I first absolutely battled my way through html and CSS when we had to do a web project in university. Then along came bootstrap and all of a sudden I felt like a front-end rockstar. Finally I could produce something that didn't look like absolute crap.
I'm sure many so called 'full-stack' devs who are really far more talented in the back than in front felt the same way given the sheer domination that bootstrap went on to achieve. My experience with bullet train has been my first time leveraging a professionally designed UI toolkit.
Now I have crossed over into the realm of feeling like a front-end god. Imposter syndrome be damned! It not only doesn't look like arse, but it looks beautiful and I can leverage the visual thinking the designer has done for me and drop some very sexy looking things straight into my app. I'm spending less time battling and more time building. My only regret is why didn't I do front-end this way sooner?