{"id":185,"date":"2019-01-04T17:16:33","date_gmt":"2019-01-04T17:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/?p=185"},"modified":"2019-01-04T17:16:35","modified_gmt":"2019-01-04T17:16:35","slug":"the-many-hats-i-have-to-wear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/the-many-hats-i-have-to-wear\/","title":{"rendered":"The many hats I have to wear"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>If you thought I was just an app developer who wrote a bit of code and published it to Google Play, you&#8217;d sadly be horribly mistaken.  Doing this all on my own, means I have to wear many, many, many different hats.  It&#8217;s a lot of fun trying my hand at all the different thing, but it also means that I can become spread thin trying to manage everything else together with my day job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here are some of the fun things I get to try my hand at while I work on my apps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong><em>UX researcher and designer<\/em><\/strong>:  I am a firm believer in good user experience and following good design patterns.  When I built version 3 of the app, I spent hours upon hours reading the material design specifications.  I had to carefully sit and work out margins and colour schemes and figure out how to get the material design concepts working before all the tools were built.<\/li><li><strong><em>Graphic designer<\/em><\/strong>:  Or something along those lines.  I had to draw the icon for London Bus Pal myself &#8211; I know, it looks like an amateur made it &#8211; that is because an amateur did!  I also did the &#8220;swoosh&#8221; image (the one in the menu bar when you swipe left) myself and as much I would hate to admit it, I also did the splash screen (it needs serious work, but I have to focus on other things for now).  All of the artwork in the app stores were also made by myself with free tools I could find.<\/li><li><strong><em>Marketeer<\/em><\/strong>:  I have to find ways to get people to download my apps.  I have to create campaigns and I have to, at some point, put that graphic designer hat back on if I want to make them more eye-catching.<\/li><li><strong><em>Sales person<\/em><\/strong>:  When it comes to sales, the main thing I am selling is advertising space to other companies.  It almost feels rude to say it, because I don&#8217;t necessarily like ads, but it is the most effective way to monetise a free app.  I have to keep my eye out to make sure that I sell the space well and for a good price.  Much of it is automated and out of my hands, but it is a role I have nonetheless.  (Don&#8217;t worry, my UX designer would never allow me to just litter my entire app with ads, it has to remain functional!).<\/li><li><strong><em>PR management<\/em><\/strong>:  I feel like some times when doing development, I cannot just do things right the first time.  I always make a mistake and have to go back and fix it.  With my PR hat on, I have to make sure that I keep my users in my good books and that they stick around.<\/li><li><strong><em>Support<\/em><\/strong>: I always have to be on top of the latest issues.  Especially around big releases, this takes up a large chunk of my time &#8211; I have to constantly monitor logs and check user behaviour to see if things run as I expect them to.  When they don&#8217;t, I have to figure out why &#8211; with GDPR combined with some limiting tools I use, this can be a massive challenge at times (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/the-helpfulness-of-reviews-even-bad-ones\/\">https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/the-helpfulness-of-reviews-even-bad-ones\/).<\/a><\/li><li><strong><em>Product manager<\/em><\/strong>:  I have to always be on the lookout for the next big things or how I can improve my app to the benefit of my users.  This is mostly what my day job is, so doing it for my app can become tedious or feel a bit fake, but it is really useful to make sure I build the right thing and not just what I feel like building today.<\/li><li><em><strong>Accountant<\/strong><\/em>: Even though I just make a bit of pocket money from the app, I still have to count all those beans &#8211; one benefit of it being a simple setup is that things are pretty easy to count!<\/li><li><strong><em>Developer<\/em><\/strong>:  This is my favourite part of it all &#8211; I get to sit down, be a bit creative, solve some problems and see what I built once I am done.  I also get to experience a little bit of what the developers I work with every day experience, so it even helps me in my &#8220;real&#8221; job.  I also use this as an opportunity to learn about things where I might want to see for myself how it works (automated testing and repository management being some of my interests).<\/li><li><strong><em>Tester<\/em><\/strong>: You would not always say so, but I try and do this as thoroughly as I can.  But when you develop something yourself and you look at the same things all the time, it can become quite challenging to do this thoroughly.  I am always hopeful that this is where my test automation helps me out, but for that I need to invest more time in it.<\/li><li><em style=\"\"><strong>User<\/strong><\/em>: I love using my own app.  It does what I want it to do and that makes me happy.  I know what I want it to do next and that frustrates me &#8211; because in order to do all that, I need to do all those others things!<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I love doing this and being able to experiment with all these different things.  I would love to have more time to devote to this, but at the moment it is just my spare time I get to use for it.  When things start picking up, I will have to look at how I make more time, but it&#8217;s always a question of economics!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you thought I was just an app developer who wrote a bit of code and published it to Google [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-bus-pal","tag-app-development"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":186,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonbuspal.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}