I know how to build a blog in Rails with CRUD, what’s next?

You’re a beginner, and you feel like you’ve reached a plateau. You’ve done all the tutorials, like how build a blog, and you want some more intermediate ideas for what to try next.

You’re might also looking for a type of problem that you don’t particularly suffer through each day.

Might I suggest building an RSS reader? It’s a real world problem, one with many fertile areas to explore.

Here are some tough and real problems you will solve in an app like:

• How do you model the data of feeds, articles in feeds, and multiple users, each of whom may subscribe to the same popular blog?
• How do you fetch data automatically, or on a schedule?
• How do you handle mis-formed RSS data, or newer JSON-Feed data?

It will stretch your current skills and help you grow new skills:

• You have a lot of directions to take the UI, since the amount of data for each user can be small (1 feed, a few articles) to tremendous (100s-1000s of feeds, each one spitting huge quantities of articles).
• You can practice using background jobs to parse data
• An opportunity to ActionCable that isn’t a chat app

Give these a shot, and let me know what you thought or learned. You can even subscribe to this blog when you’re done!