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A couple of years back give or take, I resolved getting serious with my dream of becoming a guitar god. So I wrote an app that would help me practice playing/jamming. When I finally resolved to write Museic in Java, it occurred to me that the nature of the app makes it a good mobile app project. However, a few factors like my machine specs then, kept me to a hacky desktop app.

Fast forward to today, I’m a better guitarist but no close to being Jason Mraz or Ed Sheeran. However, I’d like to think that the capability of my personal machine has increased in greater proportion than my guitar playing skill. So it seemed to me that, at last, it is time to tackle that good mobile app project.

And tackle it I did! Despite a couple more setbacks that I won’t go into here, it is with pride that I present the first mobile app I exclusively wrote myself. And whereas most of my projects just live at GitHub, often not in a polished state, and being “deployed” on my local machine at most, this time I have something that definitely screams “finished product”: a page in the app store.

Museician at Google Play Store

This is incidentally the first time I tried using the built-in page screenshot tool in Chrome. Can’t say I’m very impressed.

Born out of my own frustrations playing the guitar, making this felt awesome in more ways than one. Of course it lessens my frustration when learning a piece on the guitar. And then there’s that fleeting high when you create something that was not there before, get something to work when you previously had no idea how. It is not perfect, not very pretty, but I am very pleased with myself for making this. Working in the industry, it is not every day when you can personally help yourself with a program you wrote, something you do not because you’ll get in trouble otherwise, and when it happens Big Data can go hang. I managed to help myself and improve my quality of guitar practice without having to set-up TensorFlow. I feel like 90% of start-ups can’t even say that. Wink wink cringe.

I have a few more things I’d like to achieve with Museician, though I also feel that I’m more likely to just get this to a really-polished state, maybe add just one more feature (if it does not take too long), and then probably jump to the next thing I want to learn. The bad thing about working in Software Engineering today is that there is always a lot to learn. The good thing about working in Software Engineering today is that you need to be constantly learning.

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