An Introduction

13th October 2024

Hello everyone. This is a short blog post to introduce myself and my hopes and plans for this blog.

My name is Mike and I am learning to code around my full time job. It’s been slow progress. I’ve been learning for over a year now and I’m only just launching my portfolio website. You might notice that it is a little bear bones right now, with only home, contact and blog pages. I’m working on the others but I wanted to get it up and out there so I can start posting my thoughts to this blog.

I’m working towards becoming a mobile developer, reason being I use my phone for everything. I do my banking on there, I book holidays, I watch youTube, emails etc. It’s my go to. I do have a laptop, a lovely Macbook, but my phone is always with me and my laptop is not. When I first started looking into coding, I started with web development but it just felt a little bit off. I wanted to hold it in my hands and have it on my home screen, hence the move into mobile development. Obviously as I have learnt more I know now that I could have built a PWA for this, and in the future I may do so but I want to stay in my area of focus and keep learning and building.

As I started with web development React Native felt like the normal, rational choice for me. I really like it, it feels intuitive and with the help of expo, getting something up and working on a phone is simple. I have been using this to build a few apps so far. I have a simple gratitude app that stores your entries to the SQLite db on the phone. I have also built a more in depth hotel booking app which uses a couple of different APIs to search for hotels on your requested nights etc. I may write more about these in the future.

I was listening to The HanselMinutes Podcast recently where they mentioned always learning two programming languages at the same time. This for me was interesting, I wanted to learn Android and Kotlin but didn’t want to split my focus too much but this was the push that I needed. So I am also learning to build native Android Apps. For this I am using Jetpack Compose and Kotlin. I am right at the beginning of my journey into this so I haven’t yet build anything of substance with it.

This brings me on to what I hope for this blog. I’m planning to use it to showcase apps I’ve built. Maybe some small tutorials, mostly so I’m able to come back in the future for a quick reminder about how something was done. It will be a reminder to myself of how much I have learnt and how far I have come. I am still at the start of my journey and I am so excited to keep learning.

If you would like to follow me all the links to my socials are at the bottom of the page. I don’t post much but I am trying to post more frequently. Or you can contact me via my contact form!