My First Rails App – Kidkoo

March 9th, 2015

At the beginning of 2014 I had set a new years resolution to learn Ruby on Rails. Well, like most resolutions made, I never followed through. I spent maybe 10 hours the entire year trying to learn rails. I was distracted and I wasn’t ready. 2015 rolls around and I found myself making the same resolution, but this time the desire was there for me. I decided that 2015 would be the year that I would learn Ruby on Rails.

If you listen to The Freelance Podcast, a podcast that I put on, I set a challenge for myself in order to really force the point of me learning rails. I committed to shipping 4 public facing apps this year, 1 every 3 months. By no means is this a crazy challenge, but it isn’t meant to be. It was meant to be a realistic challenge to push me in my quest to learn rails, and for me I learn by doing. It’s those that do and ship and launch that I look up to and have respect for.

The App: Kidkoo

Kidkoo, in short, is an easy way for parents to post the funny things their kids say and share them with friends and family. Like most parents, my wife Amy and I think our daughter Molly is hilarious in the things that she says. It was actually my wife’s idea to be able to have all of these quotes in one place that she could push out to her social networks. In a quick instant I thought to myself “I could actually build that” and that was all it took.

I plan to write about my design and development process for the app, but those details will not fall into this post.

At this point Kidkoo is a real working app that is live and ready for users. It is something that I took from idea, to design, to development, and then launched. My first official Ruby on Rails app. Like most apps this is just the beginning, it’s version 1.0. I hope that it gains some traction really so I can continue to improve it and use it as a learning tool.

Start Sharing

For those of you that are parents, grandparents, uncles or aunts, or really anyone who knows a kid that says funny things visit Kidkoo and sign up. Get to sharing and please let me know what you think.