Next Semester

My first semester in the University of Fuzzo has been one of mixed success. The end of the semester is only marked by the end of the year, rather than some milestone - unfortunately, I have not yet managed to get an app to market. My finances have dwindled to the point where I must take paid employment of some kind to pay the mortgage and other bills. But I have certainly learned a lot.

 The key things learned have been:

• How to build an app. How to set up the development environment, write programs, compile them, install them on a device, debug them. How to design the GUI, how the activities communicate with one another, how to run a service. How to write Java code.
• A fair bit about the marketing of an app. This has been part of the delay in publishing the app - all advice has been that an app has a very small window of opportunity to make its mark and should not really be launched in a prototypical state, this will be severely punished in the marketplace by many bad comments and poor sales. This expanded the scope of the project drastically.
• This moves away from the main point of writing Android apps from my point of view, which was to get away from large projects with endlessly delayed gratification and massive risk.
• The Android development tools are very primitive. The documentation is poor. Very basic kinds of tools are not available. For instance, there is no vertical slider bar, one of the most obvious GUI controls.
• There are large problems around the fact that there are a plethora of different types of Android device, all of which need to be tested for.
• I do not like working alone. 
• There is very little by way of paid work in this country for Android developers. On Seek.co.nz, which has thousands of IT jobs, there were 3 for Android devs. All of them were for senior people with many years of both Java and Android.

So the University of Fuzzo has turned into what some people had predicted - a school of hard knocks. This may be for the best, to learn these things has not cost a tremendous amount of money, and I will continue to develop my app, but I have come to the realization that I must seek work. At first, I had hoped that practically any kind of work would do, but actually, for nearly every kind of work, except for computer programming, I am not qualified. Only minimum wage work remains, and that is nowhere near enough to live on for a man with a mortgage, wife and children.

My compromise is to do support work - the idea of a return to programming still fills me with misery. Maybe I will emerge from this, maybe not. But work involving troubleshooting, possibly with very small programming projects as a ancillary skill, is work that I have enjoyed in the past. And I find the idea of working with other human beings actually quite attractive.

I hope that this next semester will be more prosperous and fruitful.