My First Open Source Project

Two months ago I joined Neura as the Head of Developers Program to help create a great developer community around Neura’s product.

It was clear from the start we need to:
1. Make our users (developers) have a smooth experience integrating our SDK in their mobile apps
2. Clarify what are the best practices for using our product.

Neura’s SDK can be used in many ways. I wanted to make sure that the most basic use-case we offer — engaging end-users at the best possible moment — is available as a code sample to download and tinker with.

I Love Open Source

As a developer, I can’t imagine my career without it. I contributed to open source projects in the past, sometimes by contributing code and sometimes by being active with opening new issues and helping other developers with using it. I always wanted to publish my own project, but I was either not good enough (a reason I know today is irrelevant) or I just worked on code I couldn’t see how to fully or partially open source (again, today I know the answer is “just ask someone”).

When I started at my new position, I knew I had to make this a goal. Luckily, shortly after diving into larger tasks, one of them presented a challenge that forced me to create a side project. That side project is a simple Node.js application that can persist end-users’ data to a (MongoDB) database and send push notifications to these users iOS device based on Neura’s machine learning algorithms. This side project, an example iOS app, implemented a basic med adherence concept. Once the server was up and running, it was clear the app was a good open source candidate as well. It has a simple UI in it, implementation of a simple networking solution and the entire project is based on MVC.

And here we are, instead of a single open source repo on Github, I have two from the get-go! And the fact that this project encapsulates both specific development practices for Neura and some general principles for client-server development makes me even more proud of my work :).

The Node.js webhook sample: https://github.com/NeuraLabs/neura-webhook-sample.
The iOS app sample: https://github.com/NeuraLabs/neura-meds-reminder-ios.

If you have any questions, comment here or contact me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Also, we are hiring!