Fireball Blogs

Another quick update from me today - and another video upload. Once again I'm afraid you'll have to put up with the poor quality and terrible editing, but at least this one is short. It's also shot at the Kiln - get on down there if you're looking for a great office space in Worcester with a fantastic vibe, good people, blazing fast WiFi and unlimited free coffee. It's a quick update on the job situation and - more importantly - an introduction to the simple app I'm hoping to deliver in full to enhance my portfolio. Ratchit is an incremental goal builder. If, like me, you're trying to build however many reps you can manage of a set in a workout, Ratchit will help you keep track of your progress and automate the increment for you. I can also see this being useful to those training for marathons or triathlons, and maybe useful to the writing community too when  NaNoWriMo  rolls around in November. I'll do some follow up videos talking ab...

Things I have learned over the past couple of days: Shooting a vlog on a webcam (even a good one) is hard Editing a video shot on a webcam is hard So apologies for the radio silence since last week. I have however, managed to upload a video to YouTube that should offer a little more insight into the last post I wrote. Enjoy: Next post should be incoming either this evening or tomorrow morning - so be on the lookout if you're interested!

This isn't an easy post to write. I've been working on On Court Tennis solidly for about 7 months. I've done everything. The design elements, the UI & UX design, all parts of the Dev. All of it to get to a nearly finished (but not quite finished enough) product. And that's not all. I went through the hassle of setting up an Ltd company here in the UK. I got an accountant and setup Xero for logging all my expenses. I nabbed the social media accounts for the app and my firm - both under-utilised I'm ashamed to admit. I had to manage the workload, keep track of all the bugs I found (so many bugs 🐛), and keep in regular contact with my target audience. There have been challenges working with Flutter. Sometimes UI didn't behave as I would like, and getting used to a reactive paradigm was a big shift. But the biggest challenge came with my use of RxDart, Provider and Streams to build state management and dependency injection framework. I managed to solve that...

So, this is the very first blog post written for Fireball Apps - we're a new company in Worcester delivering software solutions to businesses and individuals with a strong focus on mobile apps. We use the latest technology to build our apps: Flutter and Firebase; but we're not picky when it comes to working with clients. I'm Dave Brealey - founder and director of the company. I have 10 years of experience developing data and analytics solutions for large enterprises and a passion for great user interfaces & experiences. I've thrown myself into becoming a tech leader for Worcester so I am researching all the time. Serverless architectures, progressive web apps, simple pages, big data or traditional databases - you name it, I'm on it! Good job I'm a quick study 😉 So subscribe to the blog if you want to hear all about the inner workings of a tech startup in a small city in England, or you can check out our social media pages by using the links on the le...