So the deadline for the Android Developer Challenge 2 has come and gone, and I did not submit an entry. It wasn’t for a lack of trying though. This was entirely a spare time project and I worked on it 3 to 5 days a week for an hour or more at a time. I’m still not comfortable going into specifics about the project because I think it’s still a viable project. I do still hope to release it to the public at some point.
I will say that I was able to write one of the major features completely, and nearly completed the second major feature. The main reason I didn’t complete the second feature is because it required scraping some data from a web site, and that web site made some of the data difficult to parse by putting it into an image. I didn’t discover this until about 2 nights before the deadline. Without the second feature I didn’t feel the application was compelling enough to enter into the contest, which is too bad. I think I will be able to get the data I need from an alternate source, so I will resume development of this app and hopefully release it to the public later.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but working on this project had increased my stress level quite a bit. I enjoyed working on it, and I’m beginning to appreciate how the Android SDK works, but the deadline was always in the back of my mind. When I decided to call it off, I felt a quite noticeable relief. I don’t think the stress builds as much for deadlines at my day job, but having to focus my spare time on one project to the exclusion of others was too much for me. I think I need to keep my side projects deadline-free from now on.