React Native Developer Blog Hello, my name is Daiki Sato. I was born and raised in Japan, where I currently work as a programmer. As I begin to manage this blog, I would like to first introduce who I am.
I am a freelance programmer, working with the programming language React Native to create smartphone apps. Currently, I undertake contracted work about 3 to 4 days a week.
The rest of the time, I’m developing personal apps. I’m always writing code. My regular hours are from 9 in the morning to 2 at night, and I spend the weekends coding as well.
My friends often treat me as an eccentric and worry about my health, but I love coding, so it’s not a problem at all. It’s like how someone who loves manga keeps reading manga, or someone who loves YouTube keeps watching it.
If I have time to cook or watch anime, I’d rather be coding. I don’t drink unless it’s right before bed because it interferes with my night coding. Recently, this has been my lifestyle.
Anyone who has ever built an app would understand – there are endless things you want to develop and countless parts you want to rewrite. Bugs also keep popping up frequently. There’s never enough time.
Ideas like ‘Let’s build this feature! I want to make this part faster. I want to make this look more stylish’ consume a month before you know it.
I’m developing a language learning app called LangJournal. I’ll write about the inspiration and details in another article, but in short, it’s a diary correction app.
Official Website: https://lang-journal.com/
Post-university, I joined an IT company in Tokyo as a system engineer. I hadn’t touched programming during my college years and started learning only after getting the job. I chose this career to acquire a tangible skill.
As a working professional, I was overwhelmed with miscellaneous tasks and had little opportunity for coding. I was bogged down with phone calls, document creation, and testing. Feeling ‘I won’t gain any knowledge at this rate! This is bad!’ I started building a web app with a friend.
As someone who easily gets absorbed in things, I enjoyed app development. Thanks to my friend’s exceptional skills, we completed the web app in three months. Our first app was a high-difficulty manga quiz app.
The web app we created went viral for being ‘too difficult lol’, spreading on Twitter and various summary sites, quickly gaining popularity. The server crashed on the third day after release. We had a constant 500 users, which was too much for the inexpensive server we were using at the time.
Realizing the server crashed during work, I lied to my boss about feeling unwell and left early. I used a sick day the next day too, spending two full days on server migration work. I vividly remember feeling extremely exhilarated.
‘Turning my ideas into reality and sharing them with the world’
There’s nothing more exciting than this.
From then on, I continued my day job while studying programming and developing apps at night. Thanks to living at home and hardly going out, I had saved over 4 million yen by the age of 25.
Thinking ‘This should be enough to live on for a while. Time to take a gamble!’, I started my own business at 25.
The result was a disaster. The app didn’t take off, and I ran out of money. I closed the company and started freelance programming work at 27.
There were many reflections, but also many gains. One was my skill. Continuously working on app development had built up my confidence as a programmer.
My contract work has been going smoothly. Now, I’m trying again with the development of a new app.
That’s a brief introduction about me. If you find it interesting, please follow me.
LangJournalは、日記を書くことで英語やフランス語などの外国語を学べるアプリです。英語学習に興味がある方や、私が開発したこのアプリに関心を持っている方は、ぜひインストールしてお試しください。
LangJournalのサイトはこちら
