Welcome to Adventure-IT!

In this blog entry I’d like to take the time to firstly welcome everyone that managed to find this page and secondly I’d to try and give some background on why the app exists, the history behind it and an optimistic look into the future.

Problem statement

The idea behind this app started in a car ride back from one of my weekend hike trips. This was way back when in the year 2020. For this particular trip I was in charge of organising everything. This would be, where we’re going, when we’re going, how we’ll get there, what we’ll be doing, and everything in between. The normal whatsapp group was made, and it kinda went alright. Until the first late comer arrived and I had to repeat everything again in the group. Everytime someone new join, I had to go through the steps of re-explaining all the details again and again. This annoyed me, and probably everyone else in the group getting spammed too.

Then the DMs of everyone spamming me with a lot of random questions. The inevitable: What should I bring? What about a first aid kit? Do we have booking reservations? What about food? How many days again? Whose car are we taking? etc. etc. etc.

Now imagine having to have to go through all this on repeat for what feels like weeks. At this point I really just wanted to get to the hiking part, climb the mountain and jump off of it. Which is exactly what we did, minus the jumping off it part.

Then in the car ride back home, the next annoying chapter in this story started. The dreaded, who owes who, how much, for what, I’m poor… Of-course we didn’t keep track of any expenses, so arriving back home, my first task was to figure out all the expenses and kindly ask everyone to settle their debts with each other… Okay I admit, this didn’t really happen in this way. My friends are cool and know how to settle things without people having to ask them. Thanks friends for making things ez.

Anyway, through all this sparked an idea: I should watch Lord of the Rings again. And from that idea, sparked another idea: I need one app to rule them all.

Now at this point in my career I was just a pleb stuck in a job that wasn’t satisfying at all. I’m not going to go into the details, but it essentially boils down to stagnating, not learning anything new and so on and so forth.

So now I have 2 problems, I need an app and I need to learn new things. Cool, we can kill 2 birds with 1 stone here.

Adventure-IT was born.

Immediately after starting on the idea, I realised its kinda important to know how to create this app before you can actually create the app. The main problem was split into 3 sections: Front-End, Back-End and DevOps. And since I wanted to learn as much as possible, I of course decided to do al 3 in completely new technologies, meaning that app development would be very slow. This was a bit of a bummer, cause it meant the app would be delayed while I’m learning how to do all these things… Or is it?

Chapter 2 (wait, there’s chapters now?)

University Computer Science students to the resque!

I received an email asking if I’d like to mentor final year computer science students for their year project. Me and my friends have done this the year before and it turned out really great, so why not do it again? Sadly this meant that I needed to think of a new app idea to give the students.

And so Adventure-IT was born, again? YES!

So for the next year I got to mentor some students while they were working on an MVP for my app idea. Again the mentorship proved to be a great success. Not only did the students get to pass their university module, learn new things AND create an awesome app, but I also got some extra validation that my app idea is viable. I call this a win win

btw, if any of those students read this, don’t worry, I still remember y’all. Thanks again for the great project. Hope y’all doing good, and keep in touch :)

The actual start of Adventure-IT v2.4-final

Let’s get some quick bullet points going of everything that we’ve been through. Mostly cause I just realised I can make bullet points in this blog post.

• Had to plan a weekend hike with friends - Hike = Good, Planning = Bad
• I watched Lord of the Rings - One app to rule them all
• Exercise Regularly - wait what?
• Started to teach myself so many things - In it for the tech!
• Mentoring students - I help them, they help me

Now, somewhere halfway through the student’s project I felt confident enough in my own abilities to create my own version of the app on the side. That’s right, this app is completely new, built from the ground up. No student code! Only ideas were stolen in the making of this app (but not really).

The release

Fast forward to halfway through 2023 and I finally got to a point where I can actually release this app. Trust me, this took a TON of work. 90% of this was created all by my lonesome self, although I had a lot of help along the way (you know who you are 10%‘ers ;) ). But I re-iterate, this was all me. I don’t say this to brag (I think), I say this to give a heads up that this app is not a silky smooth corporate app that went through rigorous design sessions or QA testing. Nope, this is as yolo as an app can be.

With all this said though, I have tried to make a really solid app for me (and hopefully you) to use, but cracks will show here and there. If you find one of those annoying little cracks, feel free to contact me and I’ll try and get it fixed for us. I might even send you an NFT of a wooden spoon to thank you, who knows.

Looking toward the future, I have a pacific garbage patch size (and growing at the same rate) of ideas in my head of where this app can go. The people use the app, the more I can spend time on it to make it better for everyone. So please share this app with everyone, even old MeMa! Who knows, maybe even get to actually pay my friends for all their help that they’ve given me through this process?

A Final Thought

I recently watched Into the wild and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. Something about it just hit home I guess. So if you’ve wondered where you’ve heard the slogan before, now you know.