Event listeners. Callback functions. Asynchronous programming? These words were foreign to me when I first started working at Shockoe LLC the first week of October 2015. But somehow, I needed to use these things to create a mobile application in the next two months.
I wasn’t completely new to programming. I had recently taking Java programming courses and was learning other languages like C++ and C# by watching online tutorials. Before I started working at Shockoe, I was told to learn JavaScript as that was predominately what I would be using to create Titanium Alloy applications. Going through the tutorial on CodeAcademy taught me little about the language. It seemed to be mostly a tutorial on what programming was. But I figured that since I had the gist of programming, I wouldn’t have much of an issue as anything could be solved with a simple Google query.
Showing up to work on the first day taught me that that wasn’t the case. Edwin, the CEO at Shockoe, assigned me to work on Fighting Mongooses, a name with which I’m now beginning to understand the logic behind.
The concept behind the app sounded pretty simple but integrating various devices, a server, a database, and mobile OS’s turned out to be far more complex than I had anticipated.
The first week or two was spent just trying to figure out what was actually happening in this partially built application. I slowly started to figure out what the different pieces of code were doing to understand the logic. I used what was already available to piece together a rudimentary working application to fulfill the initial requirements and to prove I could fit in at Shockoe.
From there, I slowly expanded the capabilities of the application and learned more about Appcelerator, Titanium, and JavaScript along the way. After a month and a half of working on Fighting Mongoose, it has taken on a bit of my own personality. It is no longer another developer’s application that I was given to complete and that is a great feeling.
There is still a lot that I need to learn to get near the level of the other developers here, but I have had some great guidance and help while working on the Fighting Mongooses project.
I still have much that I wish to accomplish with the application and feel more comfortable and confident each day with what I’m doing.
I recently found an old version of the app on a device I used for testing about a month ago and it’s amazing to see for myself the progress that I have made since.
I look forward to see the kind of progress I can make in the next month on onward here at Shockoe.
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