I did it, I wrote my first blog post

I’m not a writer.

I have to start with this because it is a fact. I’ve started this “I need to write a blog” process about 5 times and always feel like what I am writing about is pointless and no one will read my words.

I am a web developer, self taught like many of other of us out there. I tell this story a good amount, specially to new devs struggling to find their way. Around 2011, Angry Birds sold their 1 millionth game on the Apple App Store. It was such a simple game and while having a few drinks, my best friend bet me that I couldn’t build an iPhone game.

Lets rewind for just a statement. I was a life long baseball player, played college baseball at the University of Virginia, played in the minors for various organizations. I also have had a ton of knee surgeries and probably wasn’t going to make it much further. I quit in 2011.

Now back to the dev story…

I had so much extra time now without baseball in my life. I found a iPhone 101 college class on iTunesU and finished in 6 weeks. Signed up for an adobe account to get access to Photoshop to make some designs, created my apple developer account and I was ready to go. About 6 months later I release Rockslide to the App Store.

Needless to say, I won the bet, but thats not the point of this post. I also gained a new passion for development. Sure, it was Objective C, lots of copying and pasting and countless hours of build errors but that sparked what is now my career.

Its now 2019 and I am a Tech Lead at Union, an agency in Charlotte. In these last 5-6 years I’ve learned HTML, css, sass, javascript, php, python and more. This industry is a never ending learning curve and I enjoy learning a new thing every day.

I’ve built a few cool apps for myself throughout those years too. Its my way to learn new things. Appvents, a conference management app built with Ionic v1, Angular and a Laravel backend. Gym Journal, a workout tracker and coaching platform built with Ionic v2, Angular and Firebase. Working on an accessibility Mac app called Cra11y built with Electron and React.

Wow, you made it to the end. Glad you stuck around and hope you read some of my future posts. I plan on writing more in depth about some of my projects, both personal and from my job at Union, my outlook on tech and its rapid evolution, and maybe even some techy articles on how to do some cool stuff. Oh yeah, check out my tiny portfolio site.

See you soon.