Down, but not out

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 at the beginning of this week which felt fantastic at the time.

Now though, the money I received from my redundancy is starting to dwindle.

So for all that work, only to get to this point where it seems like it's the end of the road feels... heavy.

But it's not the end of the road just yet I hope. Merely a pause for thought and a diversion before getting to the destination proper.

The plan now is to take the skills that I've learned and get some work freelancing to pay the bills. Keeping a roof over my family and food on the table has to be priority number 1. But how can I best showcase the skills that I've gathered and the knowledge I've attained when all I have to show for it is an incomplete app? Especially when that app still has some value so I don't want to make the codebase public.

It's actually pretty simple. In the making of the app, I've built a fair few custom Widgets. Nothing too fancy, but in my opinion they are quite nice. So I'm going to spin them out as separate Flutter packages, share them on GitHub and across my social media accounts. They are going to be the building blocks for my portfolio.

The next stage will be to build a whole app, but one much more simple than the last. Something easy, with a local SQL backend and maybe 1 or 2 pages. All to show off my design and development skills in full.

But whilst I'm developing all these things, I'm going to be keeping a video log of the development so that as well as my portfolio showing design & development skills, I can also demonstrate my communication skills.

And if all of this still doesn't land me with enough Flutter work to keep me financially afloat, I guess I'll have to swallow my pride and go back to doing SAS work.

So stay tuned - every video I post of the work I do will have a brief write-up accompanying it here on this blog.