Hearthstone Deckfinder v1 Ready
Let's talk games. I love games, and you probably do to. They provide an outlet for players to have fun and release all the stress gathered from the day. That's why I decided to build an app to support the strategy involved with deck creation & refinement for Hearthstone. Let me preface the details with the original problem I faced.
Learning a new web development framework is hard. The challenge is, at every turn, you're running into a tool or process you've never done before. This boils down to googling this and that every 2 minutes. Thankfully, seasoned hackers are available to explain everything on stack overflow. Peeling away consecutive layers of ignorance takes real courage and persistence to do for any extended period of time. The rewards for this behavior are plentiful and awesome, but what keeps you going throughout it all? Without a doubt, its your passions.
I grew up playing all sorts of games. Final Fantasy IX, Ocarina of Time, and Halo just to name a few. Now I'm into the intense strategy games that the genius company Blizzard has provided for the world. They even have an emerging e-sports platform for these games, so you can play them full-time! But I haven't been playing starcraft since I was 11 like most Koreans, so they have a slight leg up on me. Leaving professional gaming aspirations behind, there are still plenty of ways to make money with games. There is Live streaming, which is good for high energy, charismatic people. There are support websites for all types of games that generate money from ads or membership. The point is, I figured out that a career as a web developer and my love for games are not mutally exclusive.Strategies in Hearthstone are a blast.
There are so many dynamics to be exploited. Say you just opened a card pack with a shiny new legendary. You cant wait to start building decks around the new addition and slap one together. This is all well and good, only until you get pwned in contstructed. Need help optimizing that deck around your new card? Try out my deckfinder tool: enter a card query or three and see the decks other people have built around it.
And that's why, in order to learn Ruby on Rails, I built a Hearthstone deckfinder. It made the experience of learning about config files, scss, database modeling with active record, jquery-ui autocomplete, coffescript, and the ruby language itself a blast!