Forget you have no chance - go for it anyway

I am a backend developer. Kotlin, Go, PHP, Kafka, microservices - that is where I am comfortable, and that is what I have been paid to do for years.

And for about as many years, I wanted to build mobile apps.

Not in a vague way. I had ideas. I read release notes. I watched WWDC sessions I never acted on. Every year I told myself the same thing:

Later. When I have more time.

Later never came, because later never does. There is always a release, a migration, a team to run, a weekend that fills itself.

The moment the excuse ran out

At some point I stopped waiting for the right conditions and accepted the wrong ones.

I started learning iOS the only way that was actually available to me: in the evenings, after work, and on weekends. An hour here. A Sunday morning there. Slowly, and badly at first - the first weeks of SwiftUI after a decade of backend work are humbling.

It was not the good moment. It was just a moment, which turns out to be enough.

The idea came from my wife

I had the skills growing but no project worth finishing. Then my wife suggested one:

Build something to help our daughter learn her multiplication tables.

That changed everything, for a reason I did not expect. It was not a portfolio project or an App Store bet. It was a real app with exactly one user who mattered, and she had opinions.

So it became a father-daughter project. I wrote the code, she tested it - thoroughly, and without any of the politeness a colleague would show you. If a screen was confusing, I heard about it immediately. If an animation was boring, I heard about that too.

Best QA I have ever worked with.

Making it real: NativLab

A friend pushed me on the next step: if you are going to do this, do it properly.

So I registered a micro-entreprise - NativLab - and started preparing my first apps for the App Store. Not because I expect it to replace anything, but because giving the thing a name makes it harder to quietly drop.

That turned out to be the real function of the paperwork. It is a commitment device.

What I would tell the version of me who kept waiting

You are not going to find a clean six-month window. It does not exist, and if it did you would fill it with something else.

The evenings are enough. They are slow, and the progress is invisible for weeks, and then one day you have an app your kid actually uses.

Do it imperfectly, on the schedule you actually have, rather than keeping the idea filed away indefinitely.

Or, as the line goes: forget you have no chance - go for it anyway.