How I became an android developer
A short account of how I got here…
It all started with a gamer with some sense of responsibility for his future.
Three years ago, I was spending almost all my free time (literally whenever I was not working or socializing) playing online games, specifically League of Legends and all this happened while something inside me knew that I was wasting my time, the valuable time that could be spent on learning something new or improving myself and basically something productive. But you know how it is. These online games are designed to be addictive and indeed they are! I was spending hours every week playing a game among a community full of toxic people and the funny thing was that I wasn’t even enjoying it most of the time because more often than not, the game turned toxic or I got stuck with trolls (yes! Sometimes I was the troll because I got sick and tired of playing with such people that had no idea about teamwork). However, this game gives you this false hope that it’s going to get better next game! (Here is a secret, it doesn’t!)
Maybe this was only true about me but when you spend a lot of time with a specific type of community, you start to become like them, at least to some extent. So I realized that I had become toxic and had started using vulgar language (I’m talking f-words flying in the air and no, I am not proud of that) when I was in a game that I was not happy with. I admit I was kinda weak and kept going back to this game even though I had uninstalled it multiple times.
Long story short, I was not happy with my situation but I just couldn’t stop!
If you have ever played this game, you know that people can report you for profanity and then you get a warning from Riot (the company that has made the game) basically saying, yo dude! Calm the heck down! However, they weren’t very serious about the warning and it was always just that, a warning.
Temporarily banned
Having gotten used to being warned and just closing the warning message, I just kept doing that and continued playing. But then one day, Riot was like “Are you kidding me, bro?!” and decided to take things seriously without a warning! (😅 I am joking. I had been warned like 3672 times). So I got a message saying that I was temporarily banned from the game (for 14 days to be accurate).
Well, you can imagine I wasn’t happy but there was very little I could do about it.
Or was there?!
Did I say I was addicted to the game? So I decided to create a new account and play for 14 days until I get my account with all my champs and skins back. And I did just that and continued playing (What a genius! 😐).
The two weeks passed and I got my account back. Yay! But had I learned my lesson? Well, the short answer is “No”. The long answer is also “No”.
Not having changed anything about my behavior, I kept playing with the same level of toxicity (and flying f%#ks).
How could you do this to me, Riot!
So here I was playing again and still feeling bad about wasting my time on this game. As I said earlier, I hadn’t learned my lesson and I was still using vulgar language whenever I got stuck with a bad team. After a couple of days, again I received another warning from Riot saying the same things with a beautiful report of all the words and sentences I had used in the game.
Again, not taking it seriously, I, ironically, clicked on “I understand” and carried on to play another game.
But the client app suddenly closed down!
I was like “What the hell, Riot! When are you gonna fix these crashes?!” and I just opened the client again and surprisingly (back then it was surprising…) I got the same message! This time, I decided to actually read the message and see what it had to say. The message read:
“Because a player-triggered review found your in-game communications extremely inflammatory and offensive, your account’s been permanently suspended. You are among 0.006% of League players negative enough to be permanently banned.”
So yeah… I was shamed and permanently banned.
A Sense of Relief and the Red Pill
Even though this Is kind of embarrassing (I say “kind of” because there are many people like me on Riot servers and many of them are not getting banned because they are paying customers), I suddenly felt an incredible sense of relief! I thought to myself “This is it! This is my ticket out of this vortex of unproductive, miserable potato-like life!”
And then there was the milestone of my life, the big decision!
Morpheus was sitting in front of me with his hands stretched out holding a red pill and a blue one,
“You take the blue pill, you lose your chance, you wake up in the morning again playing the same game and feeling horrible about yourself. You take the red pill, you take the difficult but rewarding path, and I show you what you are capable of achieving if and only if you put your mind to it.”
Luckily, I chose the red pill…
Motivation is useless
Now, I had to replace the void with something as soon as possible, otherwise, I might have given up to the temptation of playing the game again. That’s when I decide to start doing some research about programming since I was already interested in the subject but had never delved into it. And I did just that.
And now, three years later and after a lot of research and tutorials, I can actually call myself a developer and I can proudly say that I have completed multiple android projects like this app that I own for learning English vocabulary.
I say motivation is useless because I believe it is merely a chemical reaction in your brain during which dopamine level is increased in certain parts of your brain and you feel like you can change the world and that’s when you make great (sometimes stupid) decisions. However, another thing about dopamine is that “Dopamine performs its tasks before we obtain rewards, meaning that its real job is to encourage us to act, either to achieve something good or to avoid something bad.” [source]
What you need to keep going forward is discipline. The kind of mindset and characteristic that makes this message echo in your head every time you lose hope (motivation):
“Hey! You have made a decision and you are gonna make it happen! End of story!”
Just think of how many times you decided to do something in your life, to learn something or to start a new hobby but you forgot about it the next day! Think about the time you saw a bodybuilder on TV with an amazing body and you thought to yourself “I am gonna start going to the gym tomorrow!” but you never did and all you did was pay for a gym membership you never used. Think about the time that maybe you watched a really talented violinist or a guitarist at a concert and you whispered to yourself “this is awesome! I’m gonna learn how to play the guitar!” but you never did and all you have is just a guitar in the corner of your room that makes you feel embarrassed and disappointed in yourself every time you look at it.
That’s temporary motivation and lack of discipline at work for you
Because if you had shown discipline, you would be a violinist now or really fit and healthy!
Moral of this boring story
The idea is so simple that it fits in few sentences.
Stop complaining about how the government does this and that or how the educational system has failed you or how you are not rich and that’s why you are not successful.
Take responsibility of your future and act on it!
Take the red pill and change your life.
Nobody is gonna do it for you!
Interested in programming?
Here are a couple of sources you can use to start:
Websites:
Medium.com is one of the best places to find short tutorials.
Geeksforgeeks.org is another website to find snippets of code that are used a lot. You can examine other people’s code and learn from them.
Stackoverflow.com is hands down the best place to find answers and receive help from a community that never fails to surprise you.
YouTube Channels:
CodeAndroid , Coding in Flow and Smartherd are really good channels to start from.
And of course, last but not the least, Android Developers channel which is good for understanding programming concepts for android. I suggest you check this out when you have improved yourself a bit.
UX Mastery is also good for learning about UX design which is really important in development.
Books:
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship teaches you how to write code in a way that’s easy to read and understand.
Algorithms Unlocked explains how algorithms work and solve problems.
Happy coding…😎