Show HN: My first Rails app helps you motivate yourself to get things done

Great work! The website has a great feel to it and it seems like a good first project to get out in the open. Definitely looks/works a gazillion times better than my first website!

There's an issue I'd like to point out that I've seen come up over and over again with people like yourself who've taught themselves to code via treehouse, codecademy or some of the other webdev-education based startups. I've met developers with 10+ years of experience who make the same error though, so I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about it.

This may have been deliberate, but it appears as though you can view all the rewards on the site (including other users) simply by modifying the URL. It also seems like you can modify or delete any of the rewards on the site too (try changing the form action/fields using chrome web inspector and submit the form). Since this is your first rails app and I'm assuming you're not hoping it's going to hold any sensitive data, this isn't that big a deal.

Do keep in mind though that in its current state, it's trivial to create a script that deletes all the rewards on the website or worse, fills all the reward info with spam data.

For the last person I pointed this out to, I put together a gist of what the before => after of the code should look like for fixing this https://gist.github.com/Najaf/5431024 (tl&dr, you need to whitelist those params and implement authorization).

If you'd like any further help with this, feel free to ping me via email.

Best of luck!

I think this is a great idea. This is just my opinion, but I would love to give you some feedback:

1. I love the design. I might be biased because I am a huge fan of white space. The white with the subtle green really pops. Love that.

2. The idea itself is great in my opinion. When I do my prep work for Dev Bootcamp, I do something similar. I study for x amount of time or try to finish x amount of problems (we're talking genrally 60-120 minutes) then I reward myself with my ecig. I might be biased again, because my reward is nicotine vapor, but I use a similar approach.

3. I love this idea. But aside from that, what was your motivation to learn to program? The reason I ask, is because I dropped out of college to go to Dev Bootcamp and become an apprentice software engineer. I am an avid reader of your blog, and you mention you are a Stanford alum running a start up. Because of that, what made you think learning to program would be a good investment? This is not judgmental, I am just curious about your motivation to do this.

Overall, keep up the awesome work! It's pretty cool your 100% self taught relying only on treehouse and railstutorial.

[edit for spacing]

Did you read Punished By Rewards from Alfie Kohn[1]?

I discovered this book from this Aaron Swartz post on productivity[2].

[1] http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

[2] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity

That said, this reward style finds significant problems in the literature. Expected rewards act like a chemical fix (quite literally, in terms of how they work in the brain), that require larger and larger doses over time, and eventually crowd out the will to do the behavior on your own. I'd be interested to see how using something like this would work long term. I know its rather simple in its current form, but so are most of the examples researchers use in the laboratory.

Regardless of the science, great job on finishing and launching your first Rails app. My only technical note: your images are a bit pixely on my Retina display. Other than that it looks great!