Where are my manners! Hi I'm Glenn

After my first few weeks here actively posting instead of only lurking in the shadows I thought how rude to not introduce myself first...
Hi, I'm Glenn. I am 24 years old and live in Belgium.
I currently have a little over 2 years experience as a professional Android developer and also doing some smaller web projects, mostly just the PHP back end part.

I can't remember when I actually started programming (depends on what you classify as programming I guess). I started with writing small bash scripts that I sent through MSN (for me ancient days) that for example when the other person opens it their PC restarts or their CD player would keep opening if they closed it, small troll scripts of a young teenage boy that was just having fun (nothing that harmed the receivers property).

After that I spent some time with those online website builder platforms trying to make "websites" but got quickly bored with them and was never happy with the result. I switched over to making simple static websites with jQuery and Bootstrap (thank god for Bootstrap!) and because I didn't have any hosting knowledge and money I learned how to host a static website on your Google Drive and use a free Dot TK domain.

Finally once I started at the university I learned some more about web development and most importantly I learned the basics of PHP! I rebuild the static website I made before with CodeIgniter, learned all about cookies and caching, got a shared hosting provider. I could really see the quality of the website grow (and the user-base), it went from 3 pages to 17 pages and I made my own basic chat-box.
The website has been around for a few years now and I tried to keep it up to date, it was a calculator and other tools for an online game that I played at the time. It became the #1 community website and people even thought it was made by the official game developers because the numbers where very accurate. Link to GF5FCalc, unfortunately last week the game developers announced that they are pulling the plug out of the game.

In my last year of university you have to do a 3 month internship at a company, I chose Appwise. A small company (at the time 12 people) that makes custom native mobile applications for companies.
Even though I had more experience in web I decided to go for Android. I had a little experience with Android at the university but I quickly learned during my internship that I actually knew nothing. It was a great experience, I learned a lot and had a blast. The company has a very relaxed vibe.
I already decided that after the internship once I graduated I would apply for a job there, however a couple of weeks before my time was over my boss asked to sit down with him and he asked if I wanted to start their after I graduated. Of course I was very happy that they offered a job!

So I graduated a couple months later and started working there.
After another 2 months my boss again called for a meeting, normally you expect a meeting or know what the topic would be but again this time it was unexpected. He (together with my next boss, I didn't know at that time) informed me that they want to start a new company/department Appwise Consultancy, where developers will be sent out as consultants to help clients with their projects (developed by us mostly but not a requirement), this could be help maintain, add new features, improvements, advice, teach their developers, ... Very versatile. And they asked me if I wanted to be their first consultant. They said it could be a flop but it was an experiment and they wanted me to be part of it. I thought about it, I am young and something like this could help me grow so I said yes.

So currently I have been a full-time consultant with one of our bigger clients for around 2 years. Responsible for 5 Android apps, 3 iOS apps and 4 web apps (Laravel). Mostly for iOS issues I rely on help from Appwise iOS devs but the rest I do myself. It has been a great learning experience working so closely with a client/company. Managing meetings, different projects, different teams (external), ...

Besides my professional career I am also a huge fan of open-source. I try to help on projects wherever I can: cdnjs, DEV, CodeCopy, ...
I am also the project owner of PMSF, a map for PoGo. But as you can see the project has been stale for some time, I want to do a complete rebuild of it and clean up a lot of the code but I am having an issue currently with finding time and/or interest.
Also I am hoping that the DEV Android project will get started soon, I would love to help a lot more on this project.

I think this sums up my programming career until now, I hope you didn't fall asleep while reading it 😂

A little something about the stuff I still want to learn:

• Kotlin, currently I had to focus on legacy Java based apps
• Vue, I want to get a little better in front end development

Oh yeah maybe some of my hobbies, well besides loving to do long sessions on my laptop I am a very social person. It basically doesn't matter what I am doing at the time if someone texts me to go do something I drop everything and go out, maybe the benefit of being young.
I started reading again, when I was younger I read a lot! Currently I am reading Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship.
And I also want to start exercising again, some running or going to the gym.

Btw as you probably already noticed when looking at the cover image, I am not a designer 🤣

I have never written blog posts in the past so any feedback is welcome 😉
Feel free to follow me on Twitter.