This week I read Becky Hansmeyer’s article “We all have to start somewhere”, and it surprised me. Becky says she only knows one person in real life that develops iOS apps.
My first contact with iOS development was during my BSc. studies. We were a bunch of students and a passionate teaching assistant, and we were learning iOS development on our own, outside of the university curriculum, following Paul Hegarty’s Stanford CS193P course on iTunes U.
Hearing that there are iOS developers who only know one other iOS developer in real life made me realise that I was fortunate to not be alone in my journey. This makes me put even more value on our great iOS community, on all the knowledge that is shared out there through blog posts, video talks, open source apps, libraries and frameworks, and also on all the conferences and meetups that enable developers to meet each other.
Regarding Becky’s challenge, it’s hard to say what my very first iOS app was. The very first iOS app I wrote and compiled was probably a calculator, one of the first homeworks on Paul Hegarty course.
The first project I did on my own (without it being an assignment) was a Cocos2D game, inspired by the 2d flash helicopter game. The user could control a bird and had to avoid flying too high, too low or crashing into baloons.
All the graphic resources used in the game were found online. I’m not sure if they were in the public domain or not, but I never wanted to publish the game, I just wanted to learn. That was also the moment when I realised it’s very hard to create iOS games without also having a graphics designer in your team.
And if it comes to the first app I worked on that made it to the App Store, then it must be GeoReporter, my Google Summer of Code 2013 project.
Yes, we all start somewhere. Not everybody starts in the same place. But fortunately, we have lots of examples in the community showing that it doesn’t really matter where you start as long as you love what you’re doing and you’re doing your best