One year down and 5 apps up: My Android Journey
Sometime around December 2016 I began my android journey while I was an Entrepreneur-In-Training(EIT) at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology(MEST) Africa. Needless to say it was a tough journey for me even though I had some basic knowledge of programming. Having developed a desktop application in C# as my final year project in school, tried and failed to run a startup(travelNigeria) and being a junior developer for seven months at one of the fastest growing courier companies in Nigeria before heading out to Ghana, It was tough because even though I consider myself smart, I’m still a slow learner. So when I began this journey, it required lots of grinding and sleepless nights.
At the start of MEST we set goals and I had three for tech which were
- learn ruby — a syntactically juicy language,
- learn rails — the web platform built on a syntactically juicy language
- learn android — a mobile platform.
Note that we had business and communications goals so there was alot to be done in just one short year.
So in December I was very clear on what I wanted to do. I did an interview with Asoriba but I knew I didn’t want to do anything web or Django related for the internship as I had chosen ruby as my web language. I spoke with Gerald a member of the Beam Team and he told me he would consider my proposition to come learn android at his company and when December came I was in. Believe you me December 2016 was one of my most hateful Decembers in history. I always remember Frederick Boateng coming to the empty room(Room 14- Sandcity hostel) I used for my coding expeditions and telling me to go sleep. I really wanted to sleep but I just couldn’t until I had typed one more line of code.
Four things that kept me going were
This song was always on repeat on my VLC player till I went to bed around 4am. The song sounds weird now but it was all the music I needed to foster the love I required to continue in the midst of my coding turmoil.Music is something every developer needs as most times I am less productive without music bouncing off my ears.
- Coffee
I always juiced up for I knew the reaper will always come by for his share of rest at night for I always denied him his due at night and during the day. So I set him at bay with coffee.
- Tutorials
Lots and lots of tutorials really helped me, for any problem I was thinking of, there almost always existed a tutorial for it.
- Determination to learn.
Determination is just pure determination. Really hard to explain why I continued even though I didn’t want to.
Projects
- Cardless
Seeing failure VS Success as 0 VS 1, I saw my first project as a 0.5. The project I was given was to develop an OCR(Optical Character Recognition) scanner using Tessaract library and openGL for boundary analysis in the image so as to refocus the camera for better text recognition.
At that time I didn’t even know what an activity was nor did I know of gradle.
At that time I didn’t even know what an activity was nor did I know of gradle. I went through loads of tutorials and got my hands dirty with code and used my church mind to refactor and get my desired results.
I ended up with an application that converted 30% of the text and used loads and loads of the device GPU(Graphical Processing Unit). It took almost 1 minute to try to get an outline and then process the text.
The experience was sometimes horrible but I didn’t fall into the pit of despair. I always kept the faith.
Testing my employability quotient I went on Job boards to checkout the requirements for android devs and I came across this company that required at least 5 apps on the playstore before you could be considered for an interview. I thought it was a good metric to use and I added it as one of my goals for the year.
Build and upload 5 applications to the playstore before the end of 2017.
Another race began and in a bid to achieve this, any hook or crook was good. So I uploaded an Udacity Portfolio course project I did as my first android app on the playstore, “Learning Miwok”.
- Learning Miwok
Alot of other developers did same so miwok will generate tons of results for you on the playstore. I cleaned it up and posted it to get to know how uploading an app on the playstore looked like.
- My Sprirtual Journal
Then came a freelance gig to develop a spiritual journal where you put in your daily devotionals and review how well you are doing at the end of the week. A little bit unsure of my capability to deliver, I took on the challenge nonetheless and sleepless nights began in January again. The project ended up lasting longer than it should as design assets never came through and not having a knack for designs, I had to use my crappy designs as I deemed fit.
- Foodie and Proxeepay
After this came two projects which I personally found really interesting, Foodie and Proxeepay
They both utilized firebase as the back-end (probably the reason why I enjoyed them was because I was getting to learn about another cool product).
Foodie was to help restaurants manage orders. I felt really bad when progress was not made on the business side as I was hoping this will be my first fully featured production app but alas I had to wait a little while longer.
Proxeepay was a capstone project done by Two Nigerians(myself included) and two Ghanaians. We set out to solve the problem of mobile money centralization in Ghana by adopting the Uber model such that getting cash from mobile money accounts become decentralized and at the click of a button you can be connected to someone around you that had cash and an exchange can be done. The project went smoothly and being the only mobile dev on the team, the MVP became my duty to produce. One month and some days down the line we pitched the idea and investors loved it but were not really convinced on the security aspect of it as it was seen as a means to know who holds cash and rip them off of it(more like an answered prayer for thieves). Lessons were learnt and we all moved on to other projects as this added my fourth portfolio project to the playstore.
Planned or not I had four projects already on my playstore portfolio and they were good enough to land me a fifth and sixth gig which are being wrapped up at the moment.
This year I am switching my metrics for judging productivity to the number of active users I have on my apps on the playstore and before working for any client I need to know if its a serious minded client that will see the project through and acquire users not just folks that feel good and want to develop an app.
Things That Helped Me Grow Faster
Get Projects
Major reason I have grown and learnt a whole lot in the space of this one year was because I had projects to work on. Every project has unique needs and these needs make you learn new things or ways to optimize the old things that you have initially developed.When on a project the only option left is to deliver the best quality and believe you me clients can make lots and lots of demands so you will have no choice but to meet those demands as they come.
Get Mentors
Have mentors you can always run to for advice and whom you can freely brainstorm implementation ideas with.People who can sometimes or alot of times do code reviews with and for you.This helps to not stay frustrated for too long on a particular issue.
Credits
I remain ever grateful to Gerald Pharin @pharingee and Kingston Tagoe @NiiMantseAflah of @beamcrew. Without them giving me that internship position back then i doubt I would be where i am today.
Thanks to Andrew Berkowitz @bezerkowitz the first Jew I met personally for letting me use his card to pay for my playstore developer subscription(Turdla Innovations) and not getting tired of me asking questions about my android issues.
