For the sake of my future startup, I’m divorcing Swift 🙅🏻
Dreams don’t work unless you do
In 2015, I was stuck in a job that was unfulfilling. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and a desire to work on all things innovative, but instead I found myself on the opposite side of the spectrum. I was going to work each day doing repetitive tasks because I had to and not because I wanted to. That was not the way I wanted to live my early 20’s, so I was determined to make my dreams happen.
My Aha! Moment
During that dark period, it was also a time of discovery. I knew exactly what I didn’t like doing, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I liked either. It took many weeks of lunch time “career therapy” sessions with colleagues to nut out what it was I was passionate about. I discovered that the missing link between my entrepreneurial spirit and the opportunity to work on innovative things was the ability to create them. In a world that is currently being re-written in code and actually working in the IT industry myself, it didn’t take much convincing for me to decide that I had to learn how to code.
The other side
Slowly but surely, I was ready to take the leap of faith into mobile development and so in 2016, I quit my job and accepted a role as a Mobile Engineer. Since then, I have had the opportunity to build iOS applications for startups and enterprises. I met a lot of amazing developers, learnt a lot about software development and had a lot of fun using programming as a creative outlet to design and build things.
I’ve reached a point where I could hack things together quickly over a weekend to test new ideas…
But something deep down was still missing…
The Break Up…
As much as I love writing in Swift and building shiny new iOS applications, my skill set is very restrictive when it comes to shipping ideas out to the world. Firstly, there was a time when we thought going “Mobile first” was the thing, but as time passed we witnessed people become more and more app fatigued.
Also shipping products to only one platform is extremely limiting when Android owns most of the market share. Therefore, it is with deep sadness that I have now come to the conclusion for the sake of my future startup, that I’ll be divorcing my happy two year marriage with Swift.
I stripped off my mobile engineer label on the 22nd of December 2017 and joined a startup to become a more versatile software engineer. From now until I start my new position in February 2018, I’ll be learning React Native, React and Node JS on top of my aggressive timeline to ship 12 passion projects in 12 months!
Originally published at https://shooting-unicorns.xyz
