From an Idea to acami: how an app influenced our early career (1/4)
This blog series will explore the road of our mobile app called acami. How it started and what challenges laid upon the long road to its publication in the Apple AppStore and Google PlayStore. My name is Tobias Ramm and together with my close friend Julian Sotek, our acami adventure took its beginning four years ago in 2018. It’s a story of many challenges, stepping stones, toing and froing, and overall great memories.
With this blog post, I want to take a step back and tell the story of our project from the beginning. I will address our first goals, the challenges of building a team and keeping it together and go a little into detail on the technical side of the project.
It will be structured in four chapters:
I: Introduction (You are currently here)
III: An overview of acami and its functionality
IV: The current state and what the future holds
Introduction
The reason why we wanted to develop an app was rather easy. We always were annoyed by the organization of meetups and parties with WhatsApp Groups. It’s very time-consuming, non-transparent, and inefficient.
Our solution to that problem was an app on which you can invite your friends to a temporary group, directly see who is available and who is not, add helpful information for that event (e.g. place, time) and after the event, the group will be archived in memories.
While writing this blog, I took a look back into old chats, files, and designs — and discovered that it all started way earlier than I thought. Our first discussion on the idea dates back to the 16th of July in 2018. However, those were our first, naive baby steps in the field of app development.
What came along with the look back were some astonishing figures, I wouldn’t have believed to be true. During this project, we have pushed 1653 commits in our 5 repositories (1 react-native app, 3 React.js apps, and 1 Node.js backend). We have written multiple million lines of code according to git log — shortstat over the past four years and have a project size of 573.541 lines of code only in our main project, both without generated code like the node_modules folder (but with comments).
In the next part, I will describe our journey in detail from the beginning to the newest version which you can find in the App Stores.
