Every thing has a beginning. This is the first blog post in JDeen.com V3, my official website. Its been too long and it feels nice to write a blog. As the very first post I think it will be good to explain how I got here.

Build

This website started when Ruby on Rails V5 was in alpha releases. How ever my busy schedule allowed very little time to invest on my own website. The stack is as follows.

• Language: Ruby 2.6
• Framework: Ruby on Rails v5.2
• Database: PostgreSQL v10
• Views (HTML): Slim
• Javascript: CoffeeScript
• CSS: Sass
• Command Line: Rake
• App Server: Puma
• Web Server: Nginx
• Workers: Sidekiq

Evolution

My first official website was created in 2002. It was developed using FrontPage and animations were the courtesy of Macromedia Flash. It was hosted in a free web host and if I remember correct it was ziyan.m5.com. Through that website I got my first project, an inventory management like application. When I was a student of University of Peradeniya, I made my self a WordPress website with a custom theme hosted on www.mozeej.com. It represented the pinnacle of my web design, WordPress skills and was mostly used for knowledge sharing.

Following my graduation, I started working as a full time freelance developer. I wanted a nice email. I was thinking... Ziyan Junaideen (ziyan@jdeen.com) would look professional. I bought the domain and created a new WordPress website but choose not to transfer old articles as its now "professional" website, a decision I later regretted.

Following my introduction to Ruby while my time at Orpiva I started V2 of my website. It was based on Sinatra and DataMapper as the ORM. Salman Valibeik (CEO) and Bjoern Rennhak (CTO), deserves a special thanks for my Ruby career. I applied for the wrong job and got hired and worked there for 2 years. I thought the job said CodeIgniter but it was ColdFusion. I didn't even know ColdFusion.

After leaving Orpiva, I focused on Rails in general and SaaS applications in particular. While I liked the simplicity of Sinatra, I was loving the Rails way. Not only that, I was planning to make my website to be fully featured for a freelance web developer. Rails makes it easy to build web applications and that is why I choose Rails for V3 and here we are.