App Design

My first foray into app development started almost a decade ago but unfotunately stopped pretty soon after. I was pregnant with my second child and my toddler was going into day care on some days and my brain was hungry for something beyond housework and childcare. We had just bought our first iPad and I had educational app ideas for the children, bringing together my teaching hat and my desire to get back to programming I did at university.

I bought myself a book on Objective-C and started working through the exercises which were initially easy and fun. I had a great time to be coding again and using the grey matter but things like memory management caused struggles. Being home alone I had no one to ask. In hindsight, I should have signed up to a class where I could get the help I needed. I made an effort to seek help online but that only went so far. Then the second child came along, life got in the way and the small personal project was shelved until 'I had more time'.

A few years a later, Apple introduced Automatic Reference Counting in Xcode 4.2 which took over the daunting task of having to handle manual memory management and when I heard about it I got hopeful that maybe I will give it another go but that never happened due to other personal reasons such as worlds falling apart.

Now, there is Swift, there is self development, career goals and hence the self learning project is back off the shelf and waiting to challange me again! The app course campus is too far away from where I live so the past couple of years I have studied web design instead and next year enrolled into a gaming course. Learning app design will stay as a personal project but I am more hopeful that with the access I have to resources which I didn't have before will enable me to get further this time.

Plus, I don't have to do memory management anymore! It's hard enough manageing my own memory!

Keep codin'!

Buket Swain November 2020