How to build the great Android app? 5 things you can learn in Udacity course.
1. Look around to find the problem to solve
The knowledge about the new technology is like a super power. Now you can do everything but at the same time the question arises: “But what exactly?”. During the Udacity course, I had the impression that we are solving real problems. Sometimes they were big things like an app showing information about earthquakes or an application for learning Indian language Miwok and sometimes very small, like an application presenting information about a local company or a reminder about a glass of water. So, the first thing the Udacity course teaches is that there are dozens of problems around us they are waiting to be solved with the help of new technologies. All you have to do is look around carefully.
In my case, I live in a district of single-family houses in the town Zielonka near Warsaw. There is garbage collection in every two weeks in case of mixed, every four or five weeks for segregated and biodegradable. You can imagine this is extremely important not to miss these dates. Existing solutions are not enough. You can have paper form of calendar or you can use electronic version what is uncomfortable because you have to visit official web side and find sub page with PDF file. So problem is found let’s build Garbage App.
2. Use community to build the team
During Udacity courses there is a lot of emphasis on creating a community. We have a forum where we discuss various things related to our learning. If anyone prefers, we have channels on Slack. A lot of people create groups or connect to other social media like LinkedIn. Students organize meetings where one can get to know each other personally. During each type of communication, we have the opportunity to learn and do more than just what the course provides.
In this community I found people who wanted to support this project with their knowledge and work. Tomasz Milczarek who is, the same as me, participant of Google Developer Challenge Scholarship: Android Developer track gave his experience in Android development. He implemented significant part of an application and he was hard reviewer of my code. Tomasz Myśliwiec who is participant of Mobile Web Specialist Track created our landing page and he works on providing this functionality on the website.
3. Do not be afraid to use some new and cool technology
Udacity course lessons contain more than knowledge you should know about some technology. They show you how to use the documentation and effectively look for solutions on Stack Overflow. According to the Udacity philosophy of “Lifelong Learning” we should be prepared for constant learning something new.
This is why we decided to use something we do not know yet but what is the latest technology proposed by Google Developers. Architecture components is hot topic now and we all love Florina Muntenescu videos.
More technical details can be found in article crated by Tomasz Milczarek.
4. Make your application look great
Do you remember how the websites looked in the 90s? Created by programmers like us in times when nobody has heard about UX yet.
Fortunately today we have completely different times in which we have Material Design. We have a palette of colors, simple rules for their selection. The rules for fonts sizes are clearly described. Each UI element has defined good practices of its position on the screen. The course showed us all these rules and how to use the tools available.
5. Tell the world about your work
Do not be ashamed, show the world what you are doing. This is another very important lesson. Udacity has created a special hashtag #madewithudacity under which you can find what people do after gaining knowledge on courses and what they share on different social media.
We have sent a messages about our application to our friends on the Facebook. We asked local websites to post an article about our application. They all willingly agreed. We visited the mayor’s office and thanks to this information about the application is on the town’s official website. This caused the application to be noticed and people started to install and use it.
Let us know what you think. We will be grateful for any feedback.
