("Hello, world!")


Writing software that's magic

print("Hello, world!")

By Daniel Pratt


Here we go, a brand new blog for a not so brand new venture.  I have been dabbling in programming since I was barely able to read.  My dad started getting into programming at his new job at this little company called Microsoft, and he brought home some books especially made for kids to teach them how to program in BasicA.  I ate it up.

I kept it up as I got older, teaching myself QBasic, a little C, and some Visual Basic.  Oddly, when I turned 14, or 15, I sort of started to let it slide, and pursued other interests.  I always wanted to learn to program, but didn't really realize that it could be an actual career until much later in life.

A couple years ago, I started picking up books on Objective-C programming, and later on Swift.  I found some online courses, and started chugging through.  None of it was very good, but I was able to eventually cobble together and release my first app (which is linked at the bottom of this post).  It was very exciting to get that approval email from Apple.

My plan had been to sort of dabble, and write apps on the side of a real job, though, and again it sort of fell back into a hobby that I only got to when I had some extra time.  After I was tasked with writing some Python for work, I started to catch the bug again, and went looking for some affordable resources to put me on the path of developing for real.

I ended up finding Udacity's iOS Nanodegree course.  It took me nearly a year to finally enroll.  Given all the experience I had coming into it, I figured it would be a breeze.  I just finished the introductory Swift for Beginners elective, and man have I already learned a great deal.  More than I expected to learn from the entire course, and I haven't even started part 1 of 10 core sections.

The reason for starting this blog comes from another elective course that is designed to help me thinking about my final submission at the very end of the course that will allow me to graduate.  In it, they recommended keeping a blog.  I immediately remembered two things, I had a blog that I hadn't touched in 8 years, and I had a parked domain for my app development sitting doing nothing by charging me 13 bucks a year for the past two years as well.  I quickly deleted all my old content from my blogging account, linked it up with my parked domain, and voilà!

I plan to share some code snippets on how I solved certain problems, talk about challenges, frustrations, and triumphs.  Additionally, I plan on using this as the public page for the software I develop and release to the App Store.

Thanks for visiting!

(Now for that app link I promised)

Download Blue Tip Calculator

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