Livin’ the vida loca

When I was younger, I always had this urge, this desire, to travel and to explore different places. I always used to get on my bike and just go for a ride, without thinking where the journey may lead me. I used to love the fact that I was as free as a bird, I was able to do anything and everything. The sun used to shine and the nice, soothing breeze would flow against my body. Being able to experience this every day, was just the best thing ever.

As I grew older, the environment around me kept changing. We’ve been moving houses, moving to different cities and we even moved to different countries (yup, I’ve been through it all ). Born in Pakistan, brought up in Germany and spent nearly half of my youth in the United Kingdom.

As time moves on, one typically starts to mature and learn more and more about the real world. You go to primary school, you go to high school, collage and eventually University. And this is exactly where I am right now in my life. I’m in my third year of Computer Games Programming, undergoing a placement year for 12 months in the industry.

I have been fortunate enough to be accepted for a placement abroad, at a company called Appcelerator, which is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, California, United States of America. This is probably the best thing that has happened to me so far, I mean, like I mentioned before, I love to travel and explore new places, and now I get to see and live the American Dream! How awesome is that!?

Moving countries isn’t a new thing for me, I already had to sacrifice all my previous friends once and I’m sure I will be able to live without seeing my current friends and family for 12 months. It’s not as if I’m going there permanently (or am I? You never know, ha! )

It’s crazy how one can jump from one place to another. I’m used to the fact that I’m just a normal student and that every professional person/company has a typical assumptions about me being an inexperienced newb. But when I finally started the placement, I suddenly played a major role, without me, the company could very easily just go downhill and loose a lot of its customers. It’s a very scary thought, but at the same time, it’s an amazing lifetime experience.

Being treated like ‘real’ adults and getting the same kinds of responsibilities as a ‘normal’ employee, is exactly what makes this placement, for me, just perfect. I will be gaining so much invaluable experience, which I couldn’t get from anywhere else.

For those who don’t know, Appcelerator is a company, which made it possible to ease the process of creating and managing cross-platform mobile and desktop applications. They are the creators behind the open-source Titanium SDK, which offers cross-platform development between Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as iOS, Android and Blackberry OS.

The most amazing thing about this SDK, is probably the fact that you don’t program in the native language using the native APIs for each platform, but instead you write your code once, and you adapt it everywhere. For mobile development, you use JavaScript and for desktop applications, you’ve got the option between Ruby, Python and PHP.

Even though you use web technology, you are still developing an app, which utilizes the native API calls of each platform. Let’s say, you are coding an app for iOS and Android using Titanium SDK and you want to create a button. You would only have to write it once, but it will work on both platforms. It will also display the native button, using the native API calls for each platform, meaning that the end user won’t notice a single thing if it’s programmed using 100% native Obj-C/Java or if it was programmed using JavaScript along with the Titanium SDK. This obviously, as you can imagine, saves tremendous amount of time and resources as well as being able to reach a wider target audience in half the time!

Like I was mentioning a few paragraphs ago, working at Appcelerator, for me, is a really awesome experience, so far. This is the first time that I am working full time; previously I only had a part time job at Toys R Us. My experience with them was really bad, nothing in particular, but just the way they treat their employees in general. You simply don’t have as much freedom or flexibility as I have been given here at Appcelerator. But anyway.. Toys R Us is still awesome for customers, especially for lil kids!

More to come later!