Two App Challenges in a Month

Who said developers can’t have hobbies?

My Background

I’ve started my career freelancing on web projects from scratch and have moved to enterprise 5 years ago. For the past few years I’ve been working as a PHP developer for the top car portal in Serbia from their offices in Subotica.

And as much as I’ve come to love working in the enterprise, sometimes I miss the hype of starting a new project, the intensity of brainstorms, the tranquility of having just a business case and a clean slate, clear mind and an empty editor.

I’ve tried having pet projects, I really did. My /var/www is a safe haven for potential startup sites or new open source libraries; my Google Keep is a scrapbook for business models’ ideas and potential target audiences…

What I lacked was — motivation.

I would have an idea, brainstorm it with my wife and a couple of friends, start building a proof of concept and... The hype was gone. Raising doubts, undermined my will in less than a few days. After that, I’d usually rm -rf the whole thing..

Let’s face it, I was a lousy Product Owner for my own ideas.

Challenge #1

Then came the EU Life App Challenge invitation email. I didn’t build anything native before, but it got me interested. And they accepted web apps! And there was less than 15 days left. Game On!

I’ve teamed up with a colleague, Branko Sedlar, who wanted to try coding something different from PHP, too. And after an intense week or so, working late after our day jobs, our small Angular app, Fun Stats, won the 4th prize!

We were thrilled! We tried out all the new technologies we’ve wanted, we made something useful, and got some pocket money from it. Not only did we have a pet project, but our pet had won the pet pageant, too :)

As you can imagine, we were hooked on that feeling instantly.
A couple of days later, we entered the MyScript App Challenge.

Challenge #2

It had a 10-day deadline, with a challenge to create a unique app using a sponsored handwriting API. The promo video scared us, since it covered most of the ideas that first came to mind regarding handwriting (driving helper app, field workers’ assistant app, kids handwriting game…)

My wife, professor by vocation, came up with the spelling idea. Half an hour of exploring later, I learned that app stores were full of spelling apps, but none of them seemed to have handwriting as an input. That struck us by surprise and we saw our chance.

So, teamed up with Branko Sedlar again, we made Spell Script, a quick mashup of text-to-speech API and a handwriting API, in five languages. Branko even fulfilled his childhood dream of coding on Ruby on Rails.
After the first proof of concept, we found out that it could get very addictive.
We’ve spread the word through social networks and had players from 30+ countries in under a week!
That won us the Public Choice award. We couldn’t believe it!

Taking a Break

Aside from these two challenges, in the past two months I’ve been working 8–4 on my regular day job, attended two 5-day IT conferences and when they announced us as winners for the second time…
I felt relieved. I finally got some sleep, hung out with a couple of friends and took a day off.

These past month has been very exciting and I’ll definitely try to participate in more challenges like these. Though, I will try to invest more time in them and, you know, have a life during the contest, instead of going on hyper-drive for 10 days straight.

See you soon in some upcoming hackathon submissions!

PS I’d love to hear your stories about pet projects, procrastination and similar. This is my first Medium post, so feel free to comment