It’s about to get real folks!

I’m really excited to say that doing the Sparc mobile hackathon will satisfy another goal of mine to become a better developer as well as learning mobile development.

I won’t be doing it on my own, but have 2 pretty awesome and super experienced devs, Adam Mack and Beth Bradshaw. Together we are the Ninjaneers!

Not only will we be having some awesome times pushing our knowledge to new heights, but we will be joining many other awesome developers in the cause.

Being a UI Developer, I sometimes feel pretty intimidated when I start diving into the deeper layers of software development, and although I’ve made it this far in my career, I always feel somewhat lacking in my knowledge and skill and feel like it’s something that I always want to improve upon. Thankfully, I will be teaming with Adam and Beth as I both look up to them and hope that their ninja skills rubb off on me.

There are only a few remaining items left to figure out before the hackathon begins…and that would be our ninjaneer uniforms and whether or not we are going to go native and use objective c or use Apache Cordova/Phonegap.

Seeing as how everyday I pretty much live in javascript, I’m inclined to want to use a framework, but both Adam and Beth are seasoned programmers in Java and C, so it would probably make sense for them to want to code native.

They have both showed interest in using framework like Cordova, so I’m a little excited, but also am a little curious about writing a native app too.

I guess we will see as we’re going to start doing our coding workouts together to hopefully warm up and be in ‘shape’ for the event.

Some of the things we’ll be practicing:

• Accessing the device’s hardware (eg. camera, gps/location, gyro/vibrate)
• Using the local data storage
• Consuming data via web services
• User Interface and Orientation

We only have a few weeks left so it’s a tall order, but if we can just scratch the surface, I think we’ll be in good shape!

The cool thing about using a framework, is if we have time, we could potentially port it to other devices, like Android and Windows Phone :)

So here’s to some awesomeness going down!