原文链接:http://blog.ayaka.me/post/127980091987/5-years
This morning, I got a push notification from Timehop saying that 5 years ago today, I submitted my first app to the App Store.
5 years ago today was during the end of my summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Penn. I had just finished my 8 week summer internship at Venmo’s first office in Philadelphia.
My intern project was to build something cool with the brand new Venmo developer API to showcase it. I worked with Ian, a friend and fellow intern. We decided to build an app using the Foursquare API, allowing users to leave Venmo payments at Foursquare locations for their friends to unlock when they checked in. We needed some sort of mobile app. Because I had an iPhone, we decided to make an iOS app since I was building the client. (If I had an Android, I might have been an Android developer right now. Hah.) I went to the nearest Barnes & Noble in Rittenhouse Square, went up the escalator and to the left to the programming books section, and picked up the book Beginning iPhone 4 Development. I didn’t read any reviews or anything. I think I just liked the grapefruit on the cover.
For the next few weeks, Ian and I sat in the corner of the tiny Venmo HQ (all 7 or 8 of us in the office at the time). I went through the entire book cover to cover, doing pretty much every single example project, occasionally standing up to brew some ginger green tea, while Ian started poking around with Google App Engine to build a simple backend.
I remember asking questions like “Uh, what’s an API?” (yes really) “What is OAuth?” (a little more reasonable) and seeing more seasoned engineers use Vim and being completely blown away by it. Everything was unfamiliar and magical.
Somehow, by the end of the summer, we had a working app that did what we wanted it to, and somehow even got invited to San Francisco to launch at TC Disrupt. It’s kind of funny in hindsight because it’s like I was living my own satire of the show Silicon Valley.
Was the app architected well? Definitely not. Am I happy with my design? Nope, I think it looks pretty bad. Did I have no idea what I was doing? Yep.
I’ve only been in full-time in “the industry” for 2 years, and it’s really easy to get jaded over time. The Timehop notification this morning was a nice reminder that everyone starts somewhere, and even if I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing right now, I can try my best to figure things out, and there’s never an end to learning. Sometimes, I feel paralyzed with the feeling that I shouldn’t be trying something unless I knew what I was doing. But I want to keep up the same pace of learning (going from “What is an API?” to shipping an iOS app in 8 weeks), and I think to do that, I have to get myself into more “I have no idea what I’m doing” situations and solve my way out of it to unlock other unfamiliar and magical territories. Every day, every minute matters.
Anyway, there are a lot more details I could get into with how I started learning iOS development, but I’m going to leave it here for now because otherwise I’ll end up never publishing it.
Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have any questions and I’d love to hear about how you got started as well!
想想五年之前的我是在做什么?
今天的我,为什么踏入了这一步?
这条路会多久?
似乎每个问题都可以让人回想好久.