I've started to build on my project during my vacation. And even though I have not made a lot of progress in terms of getting something up and running for show I have made progress on a personal level.

It has been a long time, plus 8 years, since I did anything remotely web-based and development-like. I'm not a developer and so I've had to find a CSS framework to use, because I'm can't cope with doing anything in CSS from scratch.

I found Bulma which I chose for two reasons. The license (MIT) and the fact that I found that it was quite easy to get my head around. Also, a bonus is that it is not a project from Google or any such big player. Another benefit is that it is only CSS and quite a large community.

Also, somebody have made a Gem to make it very easy to install with a Ruby on Rails application. Which I managed.

And that is kind of the progress I have made. Getting myself accustom to the Rails ecosystem, to web development with CSS and such, and so on.

I have also made progress in finding resources where I can get data about prices for electricity in the EU and so on. I also managed to import a CSV that I had exported from my solar power system.

And finally I also found a charting Gem, ChartKick that uses Chart.js so that I can start building nice graphs rather effortless with Rails.

Just being able to create a layout, data imports and showing a table with the imported data is quite powerful. This I managed in about 4-8 hours over the course of a week. Generally I can tinker early in the morning or when my children are tired and just wanna watch TV.

But perhaps most important I have now some idea of how I can build my app. I have decided to create a micro service that is responsible for fetching electricity prices. I will probably not do that right away, but I think that my app will be much easier to maintain with a simple API request to my own creation managed in a separate repository. On reason is also that one does not have more than 400 requests per hour to the API at Entsoe. So I will store the results in my backend and let my app be able to fetch the data when needed. This way I can control limitations better I reckon.

In general I find that Ruby fits me. I think it really fits me, not much code has to be written to perform quite large tasks. And with the Rails framework you get so much done. If I had been working with web development for ages I might have had a different take on this. Perhaps I would have more objections to how things are done in Rails. But for me the opinionated approach of using a framework that pushes or nudges you in the right directions suits me.

I hope I will be able to get a working demo of what I want to achieve in a 1.0 version of the application in like two or three months time.

#ruby #rubyonrails #buildinganapp

Joakim Durehed