I don’t come from a software engineering background, I’m an electronics / RF technician by trade. I’ve done some Arduino hacking, and have always been scripting my way to less work at work 
I read about Meteor about 2 months ago, when I was dabbling in learning my way around Ruby / Rails.
I took a detour for 2 days and powered through CodeAcademy’s Javascript course. Then picked up Meteor…
I powered through the tutorial on Meteor.com… And was disliking Meteor more and more… Where was my MVC? What code went where? I was about to decide that Meteor was not for me, and go back to learning Rails. But the a lure of reactivity, and the ability to target mobile made me decide to give it one more shot.
I picked up the DiscoverMeteor book, and found structure. A guide! It was starting to click. I still hate Javascript syntax, but the concepts are starting to add up!
Then I discovered a few handy packages, and the concepts REALLY started to click! msavin:mongol I love you!!!
Anyways. I dropped all the tutorials, books, and took a detour for the past two weeks to write an app! It’s buggy, and lacks polish. But I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish in just a few weeks time on the evenings!
Ability to share objects between users!
Mobile & Mobile Web & Browser Image upload, with thumbnail storage, gm magick to compress & S3 storage!
- Responsive chart!!! (This was amazing to proof of concept!)
- Ability to insert objects in other objects, and propagate properties down the tree! (Plants go in containers, you can - measure the container, which then applies that measurement to all plants individually, as well as the container! So plants keep a complete history, even when they get moved between containers.)
- Develop reusable interface components! (The notes, images, and all other tabs are shared between the different collections. As well as the New / Edit modals!)
- APK Ready for install! (hydrotrackerapp.com/hydrotracker.apk)
- Complete deployment on AWS
All this and my first commit was about 3 weeks ago, and only work on it a couple hours an evening.
Anyways… I just wanted to say… I love you Meteor! I feel like the gloves are finally off. I’m in love not just with Meteor, but with software engineering in general. I’m honestly trying everything I can to turn this into a full time career!
Anyways, if you want to break my app, please do! This is Alpha… Should not be used… By anybody… etc. etc.
hydrotrackerapp.com
login: test@test.com
password: test123
Or you can login, create your own items, and share them with the test account!
Best viewed on mobile, or at least a small browser window!
Hoyt Evans,
http://hoyt-evans.com
(Portfolio & Shameless Begging for Work!)