I Hereby Declare myself an iOS Developer

I have loved to code since I printed my first “Hello World!” on a cheap, second hand Dell Latitude D160 using C. I have since “Hello’d the World” in more elegant ways including using graphical Java SE, Arduino blinking LEDs, image recognition using TensorFlow, a number of web interfaces, iOS and Android apps, map-reduce using Hadoop, Ionic PWAs, etc. But through most of that time, I was either a struggling student or a grossly underpaid employee who could not afford to fully invest in developing his talents, until this year.

In 2018, I finally scraped together $1000 in savings (kudos to my current employer :) ) and gambled it all on a Mac. I got myself a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15”, 2015 Edition) with a 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM, and 256GB in SSD storage. Nothing much to write home about if you are a developer who judges every MacBook not by its cover but by the size of its processor, RAM, and graphics capabilities. But it had to do because this was all I could afford.

At this juncture, my employer had already enrolled me for a $9.99 iOS course on Udemy taught by the inimitable Angela Yu. The in-house training department had figured we could complete this course using a subscription of MacinCloud. Still, by the time I decided to buy a Mac, this had proved impossible partly due to slow internet speeds and firewall restrictions preventing me from using TeamViewer in the office. Nevertheless, I had already watched enough introductory material to know I needed an iPhone ASAP.

So the bulk of that next month’s salary went towards acquiring an iPhone. I got the 6+ for about $330, again mainly due to budgetary constraints, and this would later prove to be a very poor choice on my part. But we will get to that later. For now, I was all set to make historical headway in iOS development. I did not personally know anyone in my circles better equipped than myself to study and practice the principles of Swift 4.

This is when the real work began! Alarms were set, morning routines were planned out, distractions were minimized, and in the end, I had a 2 hour morning that was basically: 10 minutes of the bathroom, brushing, washing the face, etc; 20 minutes of Zen meditation; 30 minutes of refining/developing/validating a business idea; and 1 hour of iOS with Angela Yu on Udemy. This usually ended at around 7 am, at which time I would do a 9-minute workout, take a shower, and get ready for work.

Now the above is either easy or difficult to do depending on your worldview, the inertia you have accumulated, and the drive you have to succeed at something. For me, it was admittedly a little challenging too. But so determined was I to complete this course that I managed to wake up at 4:55 am for 30+ days straight until it was done. I am still amazed that it took only about 30 days of intense focus to become an iOS dev.

To be honest, I did skip the one part I am least experienced in -- iOS ARKit. This was precisely the part I did not wish to skip, but the iPhone 6+ I bought did not have the necessary hardware to support the functionality of ARKit. So I had to make do with just watching the videos for that section and hoping that when I have a newer iPhone, I will finally get the chance to gain some hands-on experience in developing 3D augmented reality apps.

Looking back, it has been an interesting journey. I realized that when you start growing, you grow in more ways than you had planned. All I wanted was to study iOS and raise my chances of tripling my income in 2019. Instead, I ended up more in touch with my inner self through daily, conscientious meditation; I found myself solidifying my long-term strategy to financial freedom; the Adonis belt I have wanted for so long became more pronounced; and I am now taking a full-course on Machine Learning with Python on Udemy just because I can. After all, I am an iOS developer who wakes up at 5 am in the morning for fun, what can’t I do?