Faraaz Sulaiman - Software Engineer

Hello there travellers. It's been quite a while since my last post (and update to my app!). Looking back these last 5 months, I feel like what I've been doing can be summarized into 2 things. Minecraft and K-Drama's! I couldn't get enough of both of them, which put my android learning experience on a bit of a hiatus unfortunately. But, no more! My hunger to dabble in Android development has resurfaced. And to satiate that hunger, I decided to push out new update to my Would You Rather Kids android app. The goal I set for this update is to allow users to choose their own theme. In order to render my theme selection activity, I used a combination of GridLayout, CardView and ImageView (along with a ScrollView of course). The structure looked as follows: <ScrollView> <android.support.v7.widget.GridLayout> <android.support.v7.widget.CardView> <ImageView/> </android.support.v7.widget.CardView> <android.support.v7.widge...

I released my first proper application to the Play Store on November 2017. It's called "Would You Rather Kids Free".  It's a really simple game that took about to week to develop (1-2 hours dev day). To me, this was a really great achievement. The game idea itself was quite a common idea, so there was nothing really special about it. However, what it was to me, was a great learning experience on Firebase integration and general Android UI functionality. Firebase is awesome! It's google's mobile platform that provides additional tools to be used for ones application. The best one of all is an online realtime database. Did I mention that firebase is free? There are various premium packages with premium contention. However Firebase does have a free package with basic features, which is all one needs to start out. 4 months after the release of my app, it somehow has quite a few downloads! 4500 total downloads with 1275 active installs. This blows my m...

When I think back to my childhood, I think of the times my family used to go to the arcade/games centre. While playing the various games, I always had the same thought: "This game is awesome, but I wish I could change it so that it could have this feature or that feature". It was at this early age that I realized that it surely must be so fun to create and develop games. Fast forward into the future, the practicality and financial stability of game development didn't seem like a viable option in South Africa. So unfortunately, I ended up not pursuing it. It was only when I started studying Computer Science at university and had my first module in Android Development, did the excitement return. One of my first android applications was to create a media player. Oh, man, this was a fun but definitely challenging experience. Later in that same year, I partnered up with a friend to create a game. Yes, an actual game, just like I had dreamed when I was a child. The id...