Yeah, a long one as well. 22 years. I started off my career as a programmer and then moved through different roles along my career. Currently I am woking as a Solution Architect and Innovations Tech Lead at a leading private equity firm in the region. Yeah, it is a fancy title for a fancy role. Given all the mambo jumbo around digital transformation these days, I feel very lucky to be given this role. In this role, I look for and implement new and innovative solutions that can give a competitive advantage to my firm. I moved away from programming around 10-12 years ago and into the project management and application architecture. But as I said, deep down I felt something missing. I love coding and programming.
My new roles had little to no coding requirements. So, to keep the developer spark alive in me, I resorted to doing side projects in my spare time. I built some web applications for my friends, contributed some open source frameworks and libraries, built mobile and windows apps. I published a few Windows Mobile apps back in the day (2012-ish time). When Windows 8 was launched, I jumped on that bandwagon. I even had my first Windows 8 app in windows store on launch day itself. Then I actively worked and had several Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows Phone published over the years, till 2016-2017 if I recall correctly. I believed Windows 10 and Windows Phone to be game changer platforms. But with very little interest in these platforms by Microsoft itself, I moved on to building mobile apps for Android and iPhones. Btw, Microsoft killed Windows Phone in 2018.
I use Xamarin to build cross platform apps. Xamarin was later acquired by Microsoft and thanks to an amazing community, it has grown big. Now we are inching towards GA release of .NET MAUI, a successor to Xamarin. Fingers crossed, it will be released this month itself. I am very excited for that and have been actively working on the RC releases of it. I have even started porting Vocably to MAUI and have it ready for MAUI release. I also worked exentisvely with Microsoft in 2017 and ran the 2-days Xamarin Dev Days marathon in 2017 single handedly. It was the first of its kind in the middle east region. I even coached and mentored teams for Microsoft Imagine Cup in 2017.
All this learning, from my jobs to community contributions to side projects have really helped me take Vocably concept to fruition. Of course, time is not on my side as much I want it to be because of my day job, but thankfully, Vocably has come along well.