
From clicking on an ad to having an app on Play sotre
Sitting on a tram on my way home on a rainy fall evening, just scrolling through a social media feed I noticed an ad from Udacity. It was about the Google Developer Challenge Scholarship and I applied immediately, right there during my ride. It was about eleven months ago, and now I have an app in the Google Play Store.

Ok, I must admit, it was a bit of a Hollywood movie start, but I coudn’t resist it :)
Now the devil in the details: I had some prior knowledge of Android app development, because about a year before I started learning it from various online sources (among them Udacity’s courses were for me the most effective to get into the field), and had some experinece in software development in general, so it is not a real zero to hero story — only almost :)
But back to Udacity’s Google Developer Challenge Scholarship. The scholarship had six tracks (among them I chose Android development, naturally), and on every track 10000 applicants were accepted. It lasted three months, with course videos to watch, code to write and some research to be done as well. I don’t want to get into the details of the course content but I tried to learn Android development from quite a few sources and found Udacity’s courses — and the Scholarship in particular — by far the best. The lecture videos are made by Google Developer Advocates, the Community Managers and other Udacity staff members are fantastic people with an amazing skillset to motivate with, and the community is very friendly, helpful and motivating.
For the best 1000 students of each track, there was a prize of getting enrolled to the Nanodegree program of the selected track. The Nanodegree program continued the material where the Developer Challenge Scholarship finished it, but quite differently with much more possibilities and an even more motivating way, with graded assignments and dedicated mentors to every applicants.
But how to get selected to the Nanodegree if there were no graded assignments during the Developer Challenge Scholarship? We were told that community engagement is key, taking parts in extra activities, helping others in the course forums and slack channels. Now this is something I’m not that good at. Not that I did not help others, it is just that I soon realized that others are doing it way better than me. So I (and a lot of other participants) had to show off somehow. With some other hungarian participants we decided to build an app from scratch that can help and raise awareness about blood donations. We had a month to do it, and we did it. It really was an amazing experience and I’m proud that I was part of it. Melinda, the leader of the team wrote about it here:
The making of the BloodDroid app helped every team member to get selected to the second phase, the Android Developer Nanodegree. Here we had graded assignments emphasizing different sides of app development. On every submission we had feedback on our progress, what we accomplished well, what are the fields that can benefit from a little more polish. I personally found the reviews of my projects very helpful and on the point.
Also we were assigned experienced mentors. The main benefit of this for me was that I could get answers to my theoretical questions about app development — something Stack Overflow is not the right tool for.
I should not forget the Career portal — also available for Nanodegree Students — which basically is another multi-course material to help the students advance in their careers.
The last graded assignment of the Nanodegree was an app that the students had to design and build by themselves. It had to meet some expectations, like the use of certain technologies, but no other restriction.
I chose to develop a location-tracker app, I (and hopefully a lot of other people) coud use during outdoor activities like hiking, biking running and stuff.
Trakr — as I ended up naming the app — shows various realtime data and charts during recording and lets you revisit the recorded tracks. The app can back up the recordings to cloud and can sync them between the user’s devices. It is capable of exporting the tracks as GPX files which can be imported by all the major sport tracker apps. The accuracy (and battery juice consumption) can be tailored to suit the user’s needs, but in general the app consumes far less than other apps with similar functionality.
After succesfully finishing the Nanodegree I developed the app a bit further (mainly filing rough edges and raising app quality) and released it on Google Play.
Without taking part in the Nanodegree I would not yet be able to develop an app of such complexity. Which is funny, because all the courses in the Nanodegree are available to watch free of charge. But without the time constraints and graded assignments (and fantastic community) of the Nanodegree, and the motivational boost it caused I might not have dedicated the time and effort necessary to have learned all the material it takes.
All in all, it was az amazing journey this last eleven months, I learned a lot, met fantastic people, had great time.
