After six months of travel, we decided to stay in New Zealand, and I got some work as a software engineer very quickly. The work there is good with a lot of friendly people around me. But currently, I am not happy anymore with Angular as a technology stack. But to do private projects is quite hard, and somehow the motivation is missing that pushes you to completion until my girlfriend had an excellent idea.

The Idea: Real life Projects

My girlfriend is currently changing her career from a sales accountant to a software developer. In her learning process, she found an exciting offer called Chingu. Chingu means so much as “Friend” in Korean. I am a full-stack software developer myself for eight years, so I first started to ignore the offer. Because what they offer is to learn development and getting better in coding with people who also want to get better.

After her first “voyage” she was so happy and told me every day about her new adventures, that I also decided to take a look and participate. So I decided to sign myself up for the Voyage 11 of Chingu to see how it is and to see what a long term developer can take out of the experience. First, I looked on the medium page of Chingu and was pretty exciting to see how much effort people did to improve themselves with real-world examples and projects.

After she convinced me that I could bring up some spare time to join Chingu and can also implement the Solo projects that they want to prepare before you even can join, I signed up for my very first voyage. Besides the usual questions like your name and gender, you also get the item which role you want to take in your team and which Tier level you think you are. There are three Tiers in Chingu.

Tier 1: HTML & Basic JavaScript

In this tier, you will work on a copy of a website that you can see online, this can be quite challenging, especially if you do not know about frameworks and libraries that you can use.

Tier 2: Intermediate Algorithms and Front End Projects

Here you will usually also build a website with an API connection where you try to get data from a provider and use them to visualize them. Also, you are familiar with one framework like Angular, React or Vue.js.

Tier 3: Full Stack Developer

In Tier 3, you will find everyone that can participate in more significant projects and have knowledge about backend services, API and a good understanding of how to create a webpage.

Alright then, Tier 3 it is. I am already long term developer and working with an algorithm for a long time. Therefore let’s go and write some code. The invite for the Pre-Work challenge arrived three days ago, and I am highly motivated and looking forward to seeing how it works.

The prework challenge is a digital journal, where people can enter in a basic form the body of the note and ahead of the record. Additionally, it should be possible to log in. Also, there are the requirements to have no errors in the log file and to write the API for it. In the end, you should deploy API and Client to Heroku or another provider of your choice. The choice of the Framework is completely free.

Let the challenge begin

After reading the Chingu Handbook that explains what you have to do and what your tasks are I started right away (yes I know there is plenty of time, but I was excited and super motivated).

Therefore I forked the Repository and started working on it.

First, I decided on a framework, and because I currently want to learn Dart and Flutter (since Google.IO 2019, I got hooked), I settled for them. I mean, where is the challenge if you take something that is already released?

Therefore I decided to take a look at the Flutter Web Framework. Perfect thus, the Client Framework is settled and now something for the backend. I do not like to have in a project multiple languages, and I love it if the backend is the same language as the client. For example, I want to have an Angular app with a Node backend. Or even a C# Application with a C# API. Therefore I decided to use in my case Aqueduct (I would recommend today Conduit), which is a server framework in Dart.

Are the framework choices the best solution for my problem? No idea, but if I wanted to have the best fit, I could go into my company and not challenge myself in a Chingu project.

After the selection, there was a big road of joy and development in front of me, and I started my journey by writing several hours code, reading the documentation and learned a hell more about Dart, Flutter and Aqueduct.

But this should be enough for this story, and I will keep you up to date how’s it going in the next couple of articles. If you want to join me on this first voyage of mine, check out my repository and if you see issues, please report them.

Wow, you made it this far, this is my first article, so I would be grateful for every feedback that you can give me. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful time!