I was super excited to work on building (Loominex)[], a maintenance management system. Today, after 8 months of effort, I’ve decided to shut down Loominex. It was a great learning experience that I wish had ended differently; however, I’d like to share some of the things I learned.

I recently started reading “A Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications” by Vladimir Dementyev. I have always encountered some pain points when working with Rails applications when the model and controller layers grow in scope. One specific problem is adding complex querying logic to the model. At first, although it does not look like a dangerous pursuit, adding such a burden on the model starts to crack into the code quality. Thankfully, the book talks about the use of Query Objects and how we can use them to extract complex queries from our models.

A couple of months ago I join YC’s Startup School where I started developing the MVP for ArtsySpace, an online community of people that enjoy decorating their homes. When I joined startup school I had only an idea for what I wanted to be a side project. There were group session, where you get to pitch your idea to other founders which was a really helpful way to get feedback and put your ideas to test.

I enjoy automating tasks that take time and effort to do manually. By automating these workflows, I’m able to help out my teammates to free up time to focus on other things that are important. I recently automated a task to retrieve emails from a database and then add the emails to a database and then upload them to Box, a cloud storage service.