Building my first mobile app: the journey so far – Part 2: App inception

In this post, on my journey of building my first mobile app, I shed some light on the background and the circumstances leading upto my App (iOS) and in this post, I will talk about when I first got the idea and for the App i.e. App Inception and my recovery. So for those who have not read part 1 of the series, basically what happened was, I am a Software engineer who lived a pretty good life, until one day I was a victim of a hit and run car accident. I was a pedestrian crossing the road, when a drunk driver ran a red light and hit me, left me for dead and ran away. I was eventually rescued by the paramedics and amongst other things, I suffered from a Traumatic brain injury and things fell apart. There is tragedy in my story, even though it’s not quite like Okonkwo’s story, it’s tragedy none the less and my story is still going and good things are starting to happen.

App inception

So as I said, few months post injury, I had a break-up with my now ex-girlfriend, what that meant was that my family had to live with me for the first few months owing to certain risks to brain injury patients after the injury. So my family does not live in Australia and that meant that eventually, I would have to live by myself. So it was in April 2014, when I had the idea for my app, it was something that would help me in my day to day life, while being by myself. So I started to make something that I could use and since then I have been working on trying to adapt what I used to something that everyone can use. One other thing that’s been happening through this time is my recovery from the accident.

Recovery: the very long journey!

Now recovering from a head injury is not the fastest process and once again, like everything there is the good and the bad.

The Bad: the impact on day to day life

Now life in general was(still is) a bit difficult following an injury like this. A lot of the tasks that we take for granted, or things that we really do not think about very much are things that I needed to maintain focus on, so it is definitely an adjustment phase. Also living alone meant,

I had to cook

Cooking was something that I did at least 4 days a week prior to the accident and I enjoy eating the food I make, so it was naturally something that I wanted to do. However it was not as easy as it was before. I mentioned in this post, that one of the results of my head injury was that my left-side co-ordination(arm, leg etc) was affected. Now I am a vegetarian and one of the first tasks for me before cooking was/is to cut vegetables e.g. potato. So how do I chop them? I would place the potato on the chopping board and hold it with my left-hand and the knife in the right hand. So at least twice in 2014, while doing that, I ended up with minor cuts on my left finger. This was a bit frustrating, as living alone means, I had to put the band-aid on the wound myself, which is not easy to hold when one of the fingers in my hand has a cut.

People around me

Some people in my life, really do not fully understand what I want or what I am about? So it was almost very sad to realise that in the 30 or so years of my life, no one who fully understands me is around me at one of the worst times of my life. I could not tell anyone about it, as the therapists and all would be very quick to jump to the conclusion that it is my fault since I am the one with the head injury. It is a very sad and a very lonely place to be.

The Good: Patience pays off!

Ok, there were many more bad things that I had to go through, but recalling all that would probably cause me a lot of grief and it will be quite depressing for those reading this, so I will just skip it.

I can run! YAYYY!

As mentioned in part 1, I used to run long distances quite frequently, now in March 2014 when I was done with all my docs appointments etc, I did try to run home from work one evening and the max I could run was 800 meters. So from finishing a 14 km City2Surf run in 79 mins to not being able to run even 1 km, was quite a dramatic shift. Why? you see I also had a minor fracture on my left leg from the accident, and when I was learning to walk again, my brain knew that I had a fracture in my left leg, so I would put more pressure on my right leg than the left leg while walking, so the left-right left co-ordination was out of sync. Now with that methodology walking was ok, but to run with it is just bad, so I had to somehow re-train my brain to not do that.

Around May 2014, I also started going to the gym and I would use the exercise bike there, I am not a huge fan of indoor biking but I have to adapt to the situation. So I did that every week for almost 8 months. Then in Jan this year, I went for a run and I managed to do a 3.7 km run. This was awesome, so I kept at it and in a few weeks time, I could 5-8 km easily. So while I disliked the indoor biking what it did was helped make the co-ordination of my right and left leg better.

My scars are looking better!!

So my job involves me sitting down in front of a computer…all day long and I am a man of peace (long live the great Mahatma) so it is almost impossible to guess that I would be someone with scars and bruises on his body. The accident added a few scars and bruises on my back.

taken a few weeks ago

One year ago!

The picture on the left was taken last year and the one on the right was taken 2 weeks ago!

I am not quite there with my goal yet, but I am happy with the progress that’s there. I mean come-on, where am I coming from? the paramedics who rescued me on the road, told the cops that, his(my) chances of survival are not looking good.

My friends

Short story is, I have great friends, for which I consider myself very lucky. I have friends pretty much all over the world partly because my life so far spans 3 different continents, so not all good friends could be with me in Sydney. Most of them sent their well wishes and other’s kept in touch via phone calls etc.

Post Traumatic Amnesia (PTA) app

So I suffered from PTA as a result of my injury and one of the first things that I realised on being able to make new memories, was how inefficient the system for PTA assessment was…so I made some software for it, you know because that is exactly what you do after a serious injury, right? Besides at the time, I was away from my day job for nearly 3 months and I believe that programming is something where you need to keep practicing to maintain your skill. Anyway you can read more about my motivation for for the PTA app here, it is open-source and you can get it Github in the next week or so. I may not have been able to work quite as fast as I used to, but I did build something and my speed is someting that I hope to improve on.

So can I sum it all up?

You see when an artist like say, a singer/songwriter goes through a certain tragedy, they would write/sing a song about it(an artistic expression or something) to cope with it? so the tragedy is the story behind their creativity.

p.s. having said all that, I do consider myself very lucky because not only did I get timely help from the paramedics, I also have the opportunity to recover from some of my injuries, regardless of the time it takes. 

So who am I?

I am Bhuman Soni and I am a 21st century artist, and I plan to cope with certain events in my life through my art and my artistic expression is making apps/software. Will my app work i.e. will I get the success  that I want from it? Maybe? maybe not? But whatever the outcome, I will keep on trying until I get what I want. Besides an artist always loves his/her art, and I certainly love my art i.e. writing code and all, so whether it succeeds or not, I still enjoy the process of trying to create art.

Part 3?