What I know about what I didn't know

There it was, my second submission to the WWDC Swift Student Challenge.

As soon as I delivered the project last year, I already knew what I wanted to do for this year's project: something about the autism spectrum. Delivering awareness about this subject has always been an important matter to me. Once life has started 'going back to normal' after almost three years of confinement due to COVID-19, showing how autistic people may have hypersensitivity crisis started becoming even more important as I've started having more and more crisis.

Last year, I knew a bit about programming from studying Computer Science, but it was a totally difference experience. I knew how to make some projects in C, making those weird-looking screens that ran through the terminal and that did not very useful things, like… putting letters in the correct alphabetical order? My first WWDC submission was the first time I actually saw code doing something that actually made sense. What didn't make sense was what the code was doing, since I couldn't have delivered a thing without the huge help I had from mentors.

This year, my project was kinda similar to last year's in terms of coding. I only used SpriteKit to make simple animations. To be completely honest, coding it was not the biggest challenge of this project. The biggest challenge was facing my own personal issues, having to look for references that usually made me feel sick, or that even led me into hypersensititve crisis.

Even though it wasn't a huge project in terms of programming, it was huge because the message I've delivered was important to me. Both now, as an aspiring programmer, and as a designer, my goal was always to make a difference in the world, making it a better place somehow. There is no better way than doing this, for me, than bringing awareness. It was also huge becase, even though the project wasn't that complex, I was proud to finally look at XCode and understand what every single line did. I still needed a lot of help from friends and colleagues, that being for coding, for design issues, or for testing, but I can say that I am really proud of myself.

SpriteKit was not my main focus when studying last year, being only used in my WWDC and Nano Business Challenge projects, so I am really proud to say that now I feel confident enough to build my own projects, as simple as they might have to be.

Keeping this in mind, compared to the 2021-Naomi, I can say that the 2022 version knows how to make interfaces, knows how to make different scenes interact with each other… knows how to build a state machine and actually use it, knows how to write a code organized enough so she won't get completely lost when her brain is overwhelmelmed. And last, but not least by any means, knows when to recognize she is overwhelmed. She also hasn't forgotten how to ask for help.

In addition to the huge gap between last year's and this year's coding knowledge, I guess one of the biggest differences between each project was knowing when to back off, knowing how to well define the scope of a project, and being able to recognize some wins.

Last year, everything made me sad. The illustrations were never good enough, not knowing what I was doing when coding was disappointing, and even being a winner didn't bring me joy, because I didn't feel like I deserved it.

I am not going to lie, winning is still a huge matter to me, and I will still be quite sad and disappointed at myself if I don't win this time, but I can say that today I am happy and proud of my work. Proud of every illustration I made for this project, proud that I didn't see more flaws than good on it… proud that I was able to code things on my own, that I can explain the project to someone else, and proud that I fulfilled my mission: I made a very, very special and personal project, about a matter that is very important and emotional to me, and I feel like the message was well delivered.

I am glad I am writing this down, because I keep forgetting… but I am proud of the 2022’s WWDC Naomi.

A huge thank you to everyone who's helped me with this project: the people who helped me find design solutions when nothing made sense, the people who encouraged me to talk about such a sensitive matter, the people who helped me with coding, the people who've tested it, and also the people who asked me for help. It was amazing to be a part of other people's journeys as well. ❤

It was a delightful experience that I am very glad to have shared, this time, in person, with everyone from my class at the Apple Developer Academy.