A case for the Android way of doing things

I have been making Android apps troughout my whole career, starting with coding on the android dev phone1, back in 2009. Meanwhile I have written 20+ apps for customers like Paypal, Nrc, Dutch Railways, Vodafone and the Red Cross. Did some presentations every now and then, wrote 100+ pages of android tutorials at androidworld.nl, won prices at places like Google and Accenture, got featured on television and in magazines, made my own orm, dynamic form generator and code hot swap libraries. I researched the java compilers, made a faster type inference and am working intensively on writing a lightning fast compiler, including incremental type checking & package building. So it would be fair to say I own a lot to the Android ecosystem. Fun, income, admiration, lessons learned and all other usual experiences you get during a developers journey. Unsurprisingly, I think Android is a good system.

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On Moop

In 2010, freshly graduated from the University of Twente, I knew I wanted to entrepeneur something. In IT. There was simply too much about to be happen for me to ignore. Not sure yet how. I already started on my private project, a saas staff-scheduler, written in C# using Dynamic Data (a scaffolding network of .NET). While browsing tech-news, I stumbled upon a small company Moop having won a price at the google android app developers challenge. I visited Moop’s website, and they stated they were looking for like-minded people to join forces. I liked their friendly style of writing and their non-prententiousness, and decided to drop them a e-mail. They told me they were looking for an Android developer. Me at the time never having written an Android app, said I could probably be that guy and e-mailed them a proof concept. It was an Android app that gives public transit advice. After some more e-mails, I met them in front of Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, where they held office. At that first face to face meeting, something beautiful happened. I was a bit nervous, but somehow the atmosphere was relaxed and they promised me ‘if we get android projects, you can have them’. It was the beginning of a trust that would come very far.

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Selling Gadgets

In 2004, at inkoopacties.net (a Dutch group-buy website), after having organized a group buy for color changing clocks (I sold 600 clocks in 4 weeks to my amazement), I browsed the internet for a follow up. Not really sure what it would mean to me, I thought rc planes and helicopters would be a nice gadget. I e-mailed a few companies I found online, and somehow ended up copying the products spec, pictures and wholesaleprices (+%10) from some excel sheet onto my group-buy page. What followed may have been my first week-long adreline rush. And some more.

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