Some dreams take time. Mine took more than eleven years — and an entirely new programming language.
The First Spark#
Sometime in the early 2010s, I caught the app development bug. The idea of building something for iPhone, putting it in people’s hands, felt genuinely exciting. So I did what any aspiring developer would do: I looked into getting started.
And I immediately ran into Objective-C.
For someone without a traditional programming background, Objective-C was so overwhelming that I never really got started. Just looking at the syntax was enough to make it clear: this wasn’t the right entry point for me. The dream quietly shelved itself before it had even properly begun.
A New Language, A Renewed Hope#
Then, in 2014, Apple announced Swift.
Suddenly the conversation changed. Here was a modern language, designed to be expressive and approachable — without the bracket soup of Objective-C. The spark came back. I started learning, experimenting, building small things. The path forward felt real this time.
A Life Changing in Parallel#
While the coding journey was unfolding, so was everything else. I went from salesman to system engineer to software developer — a career reinvention that included going back to school in my 40s. I graduated in 2018, and alongside my studies I started a side hustle teaching at the very school I attended. The developer I was becoming and the life I was building were deeply intertwined.
Building in the Shadows#
The years that followed weren’t empty. I built things — apps that lived only on my own devices, tools scratching my own itches, projects that solved real problems for me and the people around me. None of them ever saw the light of day publicly.
One app let me create and mark student quizzes — a natural outgrowth of my teaching work after graduating in 2018. Another made editing Markdown-based slides a little more convenient. And then there’s the meal planning app my family and I use actively to this day — it handles our weekly meals and even tracks who is cooking on any given day. That last one in particular is a small reminder that sometimes the best software is the kind you build for yourself.
None of these ever made it to the App Store (yet?). But every single one of them made me a better developer.
Today#
More than eleven years after Swift gave me a reason to believe this was possible — I released my first app on the App Store.
It’s a strange feeling to type that. The gap between “I want to build an app someday” and actually hitting that submit button is enormous, and most of it isn’t technical. It’s persistence. It’s coming back after the breaks. It’s deciding, over and over, that the thing is still worth finishing.
If you’re somewhere in that gap right now — keep going. The App Store isn’t going anywhere.