The urge to improve experiences

As a huge fan of photography I joined the local photography club on meetup.com, a group of cheerful people getting together to have fun and make some shots. So one of the recent meetups of photography club was called “Galway City Treasure Hunt”, enough mysterious name to make me RSVP immediately.

The treasure hunt turned out to be a scavenger hunt actually (yes, I did my research on the difference of these games :). The overall experience of the game was cool indeed, but as a software engineer I always notice things that are designed inconveniently and try to think of ways to make them more convenient. So what I noticed in that game:

1. The list of items we should take pictures of was written on a piece of paper, and the host of the game manually wrote one for each attendee — lots of work for the host
2. If the host’s handwriting is like mine, most of the people will not understand anything written on that paper
3. If the list is not in your native language there might be words whose actual meaning is not clear to you, so it would be nice to have some kind of lookup system
4. Every attendee should carry a pen to mark items as they take pictures (I was one of those students who never carry a pen with them, and I’m still that person, sadly enough)
5. Marking items in the middle of the street is really inconvenient especially when you’re carrying a quite heavy camera
6. Last but not least, the pictures were later uploaded to meetup.com, and there’s really no way to track the pictures of each person for each item, or generally keep track of the played games and the beautiful photos that were created during the games

So I thought what if I design an app which will help to make this game more fun? And that would be a perfect opportunity to master new skills and learn tones of stuff that only the actual app writing process will teach. As I had Android experience before, I chose to write iOS app first to learn something really-really new. I also didn’t choose to write the backend with Java because I’m very comfortable with it so it won’t be a new challenge. I chose NodeJS instead.

So, I had zero knowledge of swift language, zero experience with iOS platform, never setup any server from scratch and just by myself, never worked with NodeJS (though have basic knowledge of Javascript), so writing an app seemed both scary and exciting. In upcoming stories I’ll tell how to start an app from scratch, how to solve challenges that may appear on your way, and what sources to use for learning the skills you’ll need. So stay tuned! ;)

Btw, here’s the “life changing piece of paper” :D