Freelance App developer
I quit my previous job because I needed some time to find out new technologies and try to develop some ideas. I saved money so I could be a few months only working on these projects.
None of them was a big success though, but I learnt a lot in the process. I was so focused that I used to work for around 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week (I was often top 5 in WakaTime). After all, I was working for myself, and not a third party… and I was young, I guess.
Meeting Point
During the first months, I started developing Meeting Point, an app where you would be able to share your thoughts with the people nearby. I used Sails.js as main Framework for the Backend, using MongoDB for persistence and Redis for cache. The first approach was to develop a single web Frontend using Angular v1.0, and make that work in mobile devices using PhoneGap. But oh boy, if that was buggy:
- The application was highly dependant on WebSockets, and that didn’t work very well with embedded web apps.
- I put a lot of efforts to make the website
responsive, but the UX was not great, you could easily tell that it was just a website pretending to be an app.
Having that in mind, I decided to start implementing a native Android app, which was fun to learn, but also a big stone in the path.
This project was a big failure 💥 for many reasons, but I’m happy of all the things I could learn during this time :) Besides, I was able to present all the work I had done in this project during my interview for a position at Square 1 (which showed that I had some experience in Web), so it was helpful after all!
Game development
I also experienced with Game development during this time. I worked on two projects using Unity:
- Asteroids!: A simple arcade game
- Arena Heroes: A reaction game, with RPG touch. I continued working on this project even after I joined Square 1.
