I bought “Agile Web Development with Rails” with the goal of learning Ruby on Rails. I bought it long time ago. I remember reading it and getting all excited, but then for some reason I never did anything with it.
And of course, if you don’t practice a language, whether is computer related or not, you end up forgetting most of it, if not all. That’s exactly what happened to me. So, a couple of months ago I signed up for lynda.com to refresh my mind.
While watching the videos at lynda.com I started thinking about a small project I could do just for fun that will help me get my hands dirty and actually practice the language.
One Friday night I was studying my Bible and it occurred to me that I could speed up that process of studying if I could have several verses open at one time, something you can’t do with a regular Bible.
I know some of you might know several desktop and online applications that would do just that and much more, but this wasn’t about creating something better than the “competition” it was about practicing and creating something simple that would help me (and helpfully help others) study the Bible more efficiently.
While Building the application I encountered several road blocks, this is something one would expect when practicing a new language, but I never thought I would find myself spending a lot of hours looking and researching resources for Bibles.
My idea was to find a service (paid or free) that would have an API to get Bible versions, verses, etc. but I couldn’t find any. My next option was to build the database myself, so that’s what I did.
Now I know that most Bibles are copyrighted, which is kind of a surprise to me. I never thought you could copyright the Bible. I guess I need to learn more about copyrights. Anyway, I was able to find 4 versions of the Bible that I think are not copyrighted or part of the public domain. and that’s what I used on the application.
After months of hard work, I had the joy to launch a small application called Bible Study (I’m still working on a few bugs here and there, but it’s totally usable. And of course I’m planning to add more features later on).
After learning a lot of this awesome language my humble conclusion is that I like it and I like it a lot, specially the syntax. I like how its philosophy and the mind set blends almost perfectly with the way you code, you can actually see it and that’s something I haven’t experienced in another language. It inspired me to be a better programmer, a better web designer and the best of all, it made me want to learn more and more.
Thanks to Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, David Heinemeier Hansson and the rails community for this awesome language and framework.
Thank God for helping me build this small but awesome application.
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