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2015: The year of app releases, open-source contributions and workplace initiatives

2015 was a good year for me and while there was no major conquest overall, I managed to take a number of "small steps" towards building a better tomorrow. In this blog post, I will elaborate on the aforementioned "small steps", which include releasing my first iOS app, the steps I took to ensure my open-source repo reaches a wider audience and a workplace initiative that I am very proud of. Let's start with the release of my app,

p.s. there were several things that went wrong in 2015 for me, one such example would be that extremely unprofessional colleague who ended a project that we had spent a year working on via email. However I will keep this post short and only focus on a few things that went right.

I released my first iOS app: My Day Todos


This was an awesome, as I mentioned in this post, closer to releasing the app, I was getting quite impatient and I was at the point of just wanting to release something and doing so felt very rewarding. I have updated the app several times since it's release and it's now at version 2.0 and I also managed to release a free version for the app just in time for the holiday season i.e. before Christmas 2015. The number of downloads for each version is nothing spectacular to report on but I keep trying a number of new marketing tricks on a regular basis hoping to increase the app's popularity and generate more downloads.

The wider reach for Html5StarterAppWithSwift

I am proud of my work on Html5StarterAppWithSwift as it was a result of my work on my first iOS app(My Day Todos) and my willingness to share my unique approach to building iOS apps with everyone else.

After releasing the repository to open-source I realised that I faced a much bigger problem: HOW DO I LET PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT MY AWESOME OPEN-SOURCE WORK? Well I still don't know the answer to that question, but I will mention some of the things I tried before it reached 46 stars and 12 forks.

  1. Featured by a popular newsletter: This repo was featured in thechangelog.com's weekly newsletter and you can read it about it here
  2. Social media: While using LinkedIn and Facebook helped, I think the most effective social media platform for publicising this repo would have to be Twitter. Twitter can be a great social media platform when you tweet something with the right hash tags (keywords).
  3. Hacker news: An online article on app marketing informed me about HackerNews(I have read too many of them to accurately remember which one) and that it's a great tool for marketing. So I put that to a test for both My Day Todos Lite and Html5StarterAppWithSwift, I had considerably more success with the latter i.e. open-source repo.

Workplace initiative


At my former workplace I was working on a project that involved lots of UI testing and as a fullstack developer I had to bear the burden of some of that testing and I did not enjoy it....at all. There were far too many test cases and after doing it for a couple of weeks, I asked myself the question "Surely this is 2015 and there has to be something that I can do to automate this". I had heard about Selenium and what's more is that my former workplace had list of things todo for teams working on other major projects which mentioned Automated UI testing. However when I was working there none of the other teams had established a framework/process for doing any automated UI testing. Why? don't know and don't want to know. Anyway at some point I said to myself "enough is enough" and decided that I will setup a means of UI testing no matter what. I did exactly that, I invested my personal time i.e. used some of my Saturday and Sunday and got some UI tests going with Protractor. This felt like a monumental achievement, considering the amount of time it saved me from doing those repetitive UI tests.


2016: What's next?

As I write this blog post my mind is somewhat occupied by my next project that I have started working on. In the past 3 months I had been writing a lot Swift and AngualrJS code, so it feels great to be working with Java again - I have a significant Java background. My next project is Java EE based which also uses AngularJS but has a significant Java server component, so I am dealing with things like Jersey, JPA etc and that is so much fun, it feels great to be working with those things again. I am tempted to put a smiley here, but I will avoid it, I am sure you get the idea of how happy I am.

Finally, I am working on my app full-time right now and if you find my blog posts useful and want to support me you can 

You could also show your support by giving the My Day To-Do Facebook page a like.

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