My first Nanodegree with Udacity & Google and how it changed my view on life
On July 27th 2017 I have officialy graduated from Udacity’s “Android Basics Nanodegree by Google” (thank you so much Udacity and Google Developers). You should have seen my joy! It’s been six months of hard work and study, lot’s of reading, even more coding and collaborating daily with other students of Android development.
There were days (especially when the deadline was approaching) when I doubted my abilities and was not sure if I would finish the program. Time was ranning out, the exceptionally annoying bug seemed impossible to solve and my ridiculously slow laptop did not make the task easier. Despite those occasional difficulties, thanks to consistency, perseverance, and — above all — passion allowed me to successfully complete this very interesting and well-organized training.
How this journey and amazing adventure started you can read in my previous article “How Udacity & Google scholarship made me dream again” which I encourage you to read if you haven’t before.
Amazing scholarship
All in all, the scholarship I get from Udacity and Google was a real life changer and I wouldn’t hesitate a second If i had to do it again. If someone told me a year ago that I would be an Android Developer* today, it would be more than certain that I would not believe it. And yet, in half a year I have developed more than 20 apps, of which 10 were mandatory projects.
Now in my portfolio I have projects like quiz app, sports score counter app, inventory app, language learning app and much, much more. You can see almost all of them on my GitHub account here. Please note that most of them are kept quite simple due to limited amount of time during the course. In the next few weeks I plan to improve and refine most of the apps I’ve written during the course in order to make them truly useful and interesting.
New project
But first of all, after finishing the course, I started working on my own project, which I had been thinking about for a long time. This will be a detective game called “Detective Jones: Unsolved cases”. Although the development of the game has only just begun, I have a quite specific plan in which direction I want to develop the project. The player will be a new New York City police officer, who will work together with an experienced and well-known in the city the Detective Jones himself. The murder case will be solved through interviewing witnesses, analyzing evidence, and listening to the tips of an older detective.
Do not expect fantastic graphics and extensive AI in this tiny little game. I create this game primarily for my own satisfaction and further learning. After the first few hours of work I can say with certainty that this project will help me to consolidate my knowledge and discover new possibilities of Android development. At the same time, while creating this game I want to pay tribute to the very simple text games, in which I played more than 20 years ago, at my old, lovely Commodore 64. The first few test users expressed their interest in the further development of the game, so I hope it will bring joy not only to me. Keep fingers crossed for me please!
* by this I mean someone who is able to develop more or less basic Android apps, not a professinal developer (yet!)
