New year, new beginnings! I am super excited to share with you the first progress update about Waki. Being the very first post on this page, I though it would be nice to give a background of how Waki came about.
Out of our love for creating solutions, helping people and learning new technologies, we (Anderson Arroyo Arca and Oluwasegun Ojo) came up with the idea of building a mobile app that is aimed at facilitating donation and recycling of items. The idea is especially appealing to us because of the potential impact it will have, if well implemented.
Apart from that, bringing the idea to life provided an avenue to explore an uncharted territory (at least for us), and also try something outside of our comfort zones. Afterall, none of had any significant software development experience (I am a statistician by training and Anderson used to work as a risk consultant). Even though we don't have any experience in mobile app development,we were attracted to the idea of creating a solution that could seamlessly integrate into people's daily lives. Apart from that, implementing the idea also provided an interesting avenue to learn about building mobile apps -a technology we believe will continue to transform how we live, work, learn and play- by diving headfirst into creating an app from scratch.
From a development point of view, it was obvious to us that we had to try to target as many platforms as possible, with as little resources as possible. So we decided to go with Dart and Flutter framework, with the hope of using a Firebase backend. We spent a couple of months learning Dart and Flutter, went through an initial process of sketching some of the pages of the app and in January 22, we finally started developement work the app.
Right now, we are working on the UI of Waki, and it has been a smooth experience so far with Flutter widgets. We are also learning about how to use Firebase as a backend in Flutter app. We plan to proceed on to implementation of the business logic and backend soon so watch this space for more updates.
We will be posting regular updates about the developement progress of the app, our wins, failures and difficulties we encounter on the way so follow/subscribe to this blog if you're interested in following us on this adventure.