I’ve been collecting a few ideas for Ruby and Rails apps to try a few things out.

In the past I’ve ended up simply building some form of task manager or blog engine. In order to explore some of the other parts of Rails though, I’m need to try and build something a bit different.

Here’s what I have so far.

• A live updating leaderboard for an event. The idea behind this is to explore ActionCable again. I haven’t used this in a project for a couple of years. It would be good to get familiar with it again.
• A command line tool for generating images with text. I had a template I used last year for creating images for the golf club’s junior section for competition announcements. Rather than using the existing template I have with Pixelmator, it would be good if I could generate the same image using the command line. A nice way of exploring what Ruby can do with a good image library.
• A Microblogging client. This would simply be a client for posting message instead of being able to read posts. The idea here is to see if I can deploy a Rails app with something like Vue.js or React built in.

The idea is to build out each of these over the next few months to understand a bit more about the different parts of Ruby, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript frameworks that I can use with them.