I don't know where to begin. This is a long story, but it all started when I saw that DEV was having a ‘finish-it--up-a-thon’. I was instantly interested, with a particular project in mind. I’ve been working on govend on and off since 2024. It’s something I started in a web developer apprenticeship. When I first ‘launched’ this ‘minimum viable product’ I was so proud of it. Every line of ruby, written by me. - No assistance from AI. The nokogiri web scraper implementation, figured out all on my own. It was ugly and I had issues with dates not saving properly in the database with the scrapers. Only recently after deciding I was going to finish my project did I address this. If I am going to ship I refuse to ship slop if it is within my knowledge and power. This is the latest before and after shot I have here:
Before on the left, after on the right
Figuring Out Requirements
I really gave myself an undertaking. I didn’t realize how much work I had left to do. Given other priorities I was sadly not able to participate in the DEV challenge. But it gave me the itch of motivation I probably needed. The biggest part of this challenge for me was to successfully self-host my app locally. I’m using AI and I did not have a personal 'server' on my local network. I had everything running off other services… render, neon, vercel, heroku, github pages.
