First App

Doing something for the first time is seldom easy. You have to grapple with anxiety, fear of messing up, confusion from a domain you are unfamiliar with blasting random facts in your face.. The list goes on. That is primarily why so many projects and initiatives tend to put a lot of effort on their “Getting Started” onboarding processes. And while this has made so many complex programming languages and libraries way more accessible to juniors and people of all skill levels, it has also sadly bastardized the process of deep learning for people with adult ADHD.

To explain this more sensibly, imagine if the only way you could ever learn a new 3D engine was to read through the well-documented codebase and trial-and-error your way through its many functionalities. That would indeed hamper your 0 to running application time, but on the flip side, any knowledge of the library you would have accumulated would have come from your own efforts and discovery, hence sticking with you longterm as part of your skillset. Contrast that with an overly handholdy Getting Started web page where you are expected to copy a bunch of lines, all the while absorbing the most surface-level, useless info dump about a trivial use-case.

Going Mobile

Over the past 2 decades, we’ve seen an ever-growing shift based on the convenience of smartphones, of people’s tech usage; from a nice desktop market to a mobile-first ecosystem that covers almost all software needs and applications. Unfortunately for me, I’ve only ever been a consumer in that market, failing to ever take the leap in developing my own small app and sharing that with the world. This is why I brought up the entire trivialized getting started debate in the first place: Yes, its cool to have a quick way into an unfamiliar domain, but I would also love to be shown the harsh truth and ungliness of a realworld app development project so that I can finally take a firm yes or no stance and proceed.