Bringing Back Memories: My First App TagOut!

After playing video games for years, I started wondering how I could make better or more customizable games. So, I began exploring how I could create games on my own using code. I started building classic games like Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Snake, and Tetris. Wanting to explore other use cases for coding, I pursued Android application development in my high school years. Starting out, I felt completely overwhelmed! I downloaded Android Studio, the official integrated development environment for Google’s Android operating system, and was taken aback by all the thousands of buttons and functionalities. I quickly realized I wasn’t ready to jump headfirst into this new experience.

And so, with the guidance and inspiration from my brother, I read various informative articles, viewed YouTube tutorial videos, and finally enrolled in a few online Udacity courses on Android application development. For the first few months, I had the task of creating my own apps (as assignments for the courses) and expanding on the starter code to develop additional features. For example, I first developed an app called Miwok, intending to provide beginners and newbies pronunciation and writing lessons to Miwok. (Miwok is a language spoken by members of an indigenous Native American tribe.) After spending days after days taking several courses, I finally decided to get to work and build a social media by myself, without any handholding. Starting out, I slowly tried to build individual pieces of the app, instead of focusing on the entire problem as a whole. As many say, “to make it easier on yourself, break down the problem into smaller, easier to solve problems.” I worked first on developing a login and registration page and implementing the Google Sign-In feature. As I moved onto the posting feature, I tried to focus on designing a friendly user interface and storing post information in my realtime database. As I moved onto the messaging feature, I realized I need to import a vast number of open-source software packages that I never knew about before and store messages and image files in Firebase Storage, a place to upload and store user generated content. Without diving too much into the technical details, the entire process took nearly six months. It was definitely a worthwhile experience, as it provided confidence and pushed me to develop my future apps.

Today, this app is available on the Google Play Store and called TagOut!. (Isn’t this a great name?) TagOut! is a platform designed to maximize social interaction between users. It also enables users to message with one another and send pictures/documents instantly too!

If you were interested, see this link for more information about TagOut!.