Apple Developer Academy: The last reflection

A journey with a lot of work, a few bittersweet feelings, and a result to be proud of.

It's no news to anyone who's heard me talking about the Academy the much I've enjoyed the experience of being there. Now that it's coming to an end, it's hard to express exactly how I feel… nostalgic and upset, but also extremely grateful and proud.

Let's get this reflection started from the end: the Macro Challenge.

Moov.ai

Moov.ai was born from the desire of five students who had the goal of making an app that would somehow make a difference in the world.

You can read about the whole process here, so I'll focus more on the reflection part.

This is a project I'm extremely proud of. When we got started, everyone told us if we were able to map one single workout it would be amazing. We ended up mapping 4. I'm happy about all the research we performed to come up with our scope, and great communication at the beginning of the project that led us to finding a theme everyone was excited to work with. When we got started, none of us had the expectation to continue the project after the Academy was over. However, most of us got so into the idea and proud of our outcome that we decided to take it further.

Not everything are flowers, though. Remember I said we had great communication in the beginning? Emphasis on beginning, because this is something we started losing as the project went on. It's not that we didn't talk to each other, but we were not fully transparent. This led to some misunderstandings, having us feel upset at each other at some points. It's weird because I always thought we were all close enough to be open about everything, but it turns out I was wrong — not only about the others, but myself as well.

Sometimes I believe it's almost a pattern in the students from the Academy to be harsh on ourselves. I've seen and lived it so many times; going further can we could even handle, taking in more responsibilites than we have time for. This was recurrent in our project. We all went through a lot of things: all memebers had jobs, some were still in university, and most of us had health issues, whether that being physical or mental. I can confirm, from my perspective, I put too much pressure on myself from the fact that during our winter break I was so ill I was hospitalized, and still felt guilty about not working on the project. The worst part about this is we felt insecure sharing not only our struggles with each other, but also about being clear when people did something upsetting for us.

Getting more in depth about feeling upset, there were a few episodes I felt my opinion was not relevant. I ended up not realizing it during the process, but once it was over and I started looking back, I felt like in several situations my opinion seemed to be ignored, and others that my work and effort felt irrelevant. Even though I'm aware of what I've been part of: UX/UI process, recording/editing all the videos and voice feedbacks for the workouts, and coding the interface that we currently have in the product, it makes me question myself: was my work really enough?

We also struggled a little bit with our task management. Sometimes, people would get carried away by feeling excited about a certain task, and would spend too much time on it, regardless of our scope. In addition to that, since we were able to map more exercises we'd planned to relatively early on, we started to embrace too many other things, and sometimes ended up starting many, but not finishing any. With all this work building up, we did not prepare in advance for the presentation, which I believe was the most overwhelming and frustrating part of the process. Even though some things were missing, we overcame our main goal with the app. We were all extremely excited about it, but ended up having a bad presentation in the end. That does not discard all the rest of our work, but it's upsetting that when we finally had time to breathe and relax on our hard work, it was not close to the plan.

Talking about bittersweet feelings, let's talk a little about the feelings I have today, since it'll end tomorrow.

I am extremely grateful for the whole experience. Even though I had huge expectations, it was all that and much more. I end this experience with tons more knowledge both in design and programming, and with people who I've grown to love during these two years.

In the first challenge, I had the help of a mentor who took me by the hand and showed me my way into coding in Swift. After very traumatic 2.5 years of Computer Science in university, I could swear I'd never code again. Not only I did it, but it was the first time I saw something real come out of my work as a developer. In a couple hours, my whole perspective about programming changed, and the first thing that came to my mind is how I'd like to return the favor somehow.

Even though I'd already had some years of experience in UX/UI, I was always aiming low. Companies that did not value my work, with really bad paychecks. The connections I've made in the Academy made me realize those jobs were not compatible with my potential, and I was encouraged to apply not only for real job offers, in companies that took design seriously. I ended up getting a mid-level job on the biggest consulting company in the world last October, and a Design Lead position in an extremely nice company this November.

The whole experience was amazing, joyful and rewarding. What makes the feelings bittersweet is thinking it's now over. I mean, now what? The Academy has become the place where my heart is, and it feels weird to think I won't be a student there anymore.

I don't know what the future holds. All I know is: this was the best experience of my life.