Retrospective: A Year of Coding

[Jeffser]

Hi everyone, it's been a year since I started developing Alpaca, so I wanted to just write about my experience as a new developer.

Community

Developing Alpaca has made me talk more online, something that I rarely did before, I've talked to really kind and welcoming people because of the small fame that Alpaca has given me and I think that's really cool.

Of course shout out to all the translators, contributors and people from Gnome that have helped me make Alpaca a great app, you are all awesome.

Documentation

I gotta admit, when I first started developing Alpaca I had no idea what I was doing, I just wanted to make something using Gnome Builder, eventually I published it on Flathub and it snowballed into this huge app that I love developing.

Coding Alpaca has teach me how to read documentation instead of looking for answers with AI or SlackOverflow, I've noticed my knowledge and abilities getting better with each month even though my code is still kind of a pile of spaghetti (working on it lol).

Alpaca's Mentions

I remember the first time people talked about my app online outside of the repo, they were complaining about the name being similar to Alpaka (something from KDE's side). It's funny that even though they were criticizing my app I felt kinda happy that a group of people took time to talk about my work.

Alpaca has been mentioned by some large YouTubers like The Linux Experiment and it even got a Forbes article.

I even met someone at my college that runs Linux and they had Alpaca installed (I was too embarrassed to tell them I was the developer though lol).

I guess it hasn't really computed in my brain the fact that Alpaca has gotten more than 140 thousand downloads on Flathub alone.

Gaming

I stopped playing games on my PC because every time I played something I got the itch to fix a bug or add something new to Alpaca. Some might call it obsession, I call it dedication.

Reddit

So I don't really use social media that much, but I wanted to talk about r/gnome the people there are so nice, they give me suggestions and congratulate me on every release I advertise there, so I just wanted to give them a shout out.

College and Job Search

I'll probably finish my bachelors in computer science this year, I plan on start looking for a job once I've finished my studies.

So yeah I hope they are hiring at my local McDonald's lol.

In all seriousness, I want to try my luck at Canonical since they have international jobs, and hey, I have an app on their snap store so maybe that could get me a job.

Note: If someone from Canonical is reading this, my email is in my profile 👀

There are also a lot more tech companies in Costa Rica than what you might expect, we have Microsoft, VMWare, Intel, Akamai, Amazon and probably others I'm forgetting about.

Hopefully Alpaca will be a nice addition to my CV.

Donations

Thank you to everyone that has donated money to me, I've said it before but this has basically paid for all my trips to my college campus and food from there.

It isn't a livable wage but it's really nice to make any amount of money from something I do mostly for fun.

Gnome Circle

Remember when I first submitted Alpaca to Gnome Circle? It's been while hasn't it? lol

I realized I never gave an update here about that, Alpaca is still being considered but it takes a while to completely verify an app follows all the Gnome guidelines.

Of course I'm constantly updating Alpaca and it's not like I'm paying for someone to review it so I can't really complain about it.

The Gnome people have a lot of stuff on their plates and I'm so grateful to them for managing such a huge and awesome project.

Hopefully I can get Alpaca in Gnome Circles eventually!

Conclusions

It's been an awesome year for me as a developer, hopefully Alpaca and I can continue to grow.

Thank you for reading this and thanks to everyone that has supported me this year!