Appspiration

In my previous post I wrote about how the Apps got me a job in Motorola . Now work on the Motorola MOTOACTV smart watch was going on well. On the personal front, I had also released 3 Android chess apps on the Play Store (no iOS apps yet, since this was still a side hustle using tech skills which I knew). Meeting Anand The year was 2012, and a team from Motorola with me as the captain, decided to participate in a Corporate Chess tournament in the month of July. The event consisted of team matches as well as an individual tournament. The highlight of the event was also a chance to play a game with none other than the then world champion Viswanathan Anand, provided one finishes in the top 10. There was also an option for a dinner with him (paid entry!). Although the team did not fare well, in the individual event I finished 4th, which meant I was eligible to play Anand! What a moment it was for me, not only to personally see the world chess champion face to face but try my chess skil...

The year is 2009. By this time , I had already released 2 Chess apps out there in the wild. The 2nd app, a simple chess database reader: 'PGN Reader' I kept releasing more updates to the Apps. Most of it was based on user feedback. In an upcoming post I will talk more in-depth on how listening to customers and quickly responding to grievances has improved our Apps and also many 1 star ratings have changed to 4 or 5 stars! Meanwhile, I returned back to India to continue the same project which I was working on while in the US. Work had become quite monotonous by then. Coincidentally, a colleague of mine mentioned about his friend in Motorola and that they were looking for Android developers. Till then, my main skills were in developing entreprise apps using Java/J2EE. But since Android primarily used Java, I decided to give this opportunity a shot! Android was just picking up and there were not many Android engineers in Bangalore. In the tech interview, I showed the interviewer...