Subtitle: how a full-time corporate employee with no computer science background did it
English is not my first language, I’ll just skip my life story which is not that interesting anyway, and go straight to the point. In short, I managed to learned iOS development in my spare time from scratch and successfully released two iOS Apps to the App Store in 101 days. This is yet another experience sharing article hopefully could help others out there like me.
The Motivation
Before you step on this path, ask yourself, if there’s anything you would like to build, or a problem to solve, if the answer is no, then obviously you’re not ready, there’s plenty of other fun things to do instead of spending 2 hours everyday after work to try to learn something which you got nowhere to apply.
Take my very first app for example, before I started earlier this year, I had been bothered by one problem at work, basically, part of my job is to do inventory check at the end of each month, what we did was either to print out the excel spreadsheet or to carry the laptop with us, wouldn’t it be dreamy if I could stick the inventory data into my be loved iPhone, I tried several apps out there, found no one fits my needs, how about to take the control, to scratch my own itch, that’s how the whole journey started for me. And 70 days later, Inventory Todo came to this world.
The Knowledge
Learn the basics in the first 20 hours then Google your way out.
Josh Kaufman gave a TED talk about the first 20 hours — how to learn anything, if you haven’t watch it, go do that. How I applied it was to learn as much basics as you can when you first started, when you still believe possibilities are limitless, when you have not yet second doubt yourself.
Once you got down the basics, start working on your ideas right away, even if there’s still some features you’re not so sure about how to implement, you have to face the fact that you will never be able to learn everything, so start applying what you just learned to your ideas or real world problems when they’re still fresh. Because of the vibrant growth of iOS development community in the past years, people around the world had already asked pretty much every possible question you may have while building your app, the cumulated online knowledge base (of course I’m talking about stackoverflow) is tremendous, and they’re just a Google away.
The Fuel
There’s another interesting TED talk, Keep your goals to yourself given by Derek Sivers. But I live in a time that sharing is so easy, and I want to share, how am I able to do that without blowing off my goal? I gathered bunch of people to watch every step I took heading toward my goal.
I created a online study group at one of the local web forum where I would post one post each day to share the progress I made that day, and I had 100+ study pal joined that group, it’s not really a active study group I admit, I owned 99% of the posts there, and barely anyone ever commented on my post, but, it gives me some sense of responsibility, that’s what it stopped me every time I want to give up, I told myself, there’s 100+ people out there watching you (not really probably, but I trick myself to believe so : ), and you don’t want to let them down.
End of this article
Today is the 101 days mark since I started, and my second app, Tumblr Album, a Tumblr photo album app with pass code feature hit the App Store this morning.
It’s been such a rewarding experience for me in the past 101 days, I had so much fun in the process of making my app, to turn my ideas into reality, the app I built may potentially help the 800+ people who downloaded Inventory Todo to print less papers to get their job done.
To make a difference, one app at a time.
This is the end of this article, but not the end of my programming / problem-solving journey.