For more than seven years, I worked on developing software for mobile phones for blind users. Coming from a background of mainstream internet software, this was a serious professional detour, but it had an altruistic aspect that made it interesting, and coinciding as it did with uprooting myself and moving to another continent, it didn’t seem like an unreasonable career choice. Certainly it was the one period in my life where my job seemed almost interesting to non-techies, since it was just unusual enough to pique their interest.
However, there are few software markets that are more niche than mobile accessibility, and while mobile technology itself was exploding with the advent of connected smartphones and app stores, my small corner was focused on small details like speaking the calendar date or navigating the touchscreen. Important things, yes, but it did leave me with the distinct sensation that Big Things were passing me by.
One of the most significant aspects of this was the fact that the work I was doing had very little to do with the internet. Web 2.0 was like a big party that you hear through the walls from your neighbor’s apartment, and the fact that you’re doing important work around the house doesn’t change the fact that people nearby are having a lot more fun than you are. More importantly, I sensed that my technical skills were rapidly stagnating, becoming irrelevant outside of a very narrow range of products. Visions of myself as a 60-year-old COBOL programmer started to haunt me.
When I switched jobs late last year, I began to shake off those cobwebs and take a look around. Suddenly I was dealing with technologies that I had never touched before, and that were relevant and current. What’s more, the atmosphere of an R&D center was much more conducive to investigation; being surrounded by smart people with eclectic skills and interests can do a lot to put you in the right mindset for learning new things. Over time, my mental to-do list of projects, both professional and personal, started to grow and look more doable.
The problem, as always, was time. Ramping up on a new job while raising a toddler doesn’t leave much time for fun side projects, so most of these projects sat idle in the “someday” pile. One in particular kept coming to mind, though, particularly as Twitter began to take center stage as a force for social change in various parts of the world. I was amazed at what a rich and immediate source of information Twitter was, but the fact that I can’t read Arabic, Greek, or any of a hundred other languages limited my access to that information. I occasionally resorted to online translators for individual messages that seemed important, but what I really wanted was a Twitter-savvy interpreter to read the stream of messages to me in real-time.
Following the maker’s rule of “if you can’t find it, build it,” I decided to do just that. Over a few nights and with the help of Microsoft’s Translation API, this morning I pushed the first version of Tweeterpret online. As my first public launch of a product based on a handful of technologies I’d barely used before, I decided to promote it very little at first, tweeting the link to a few followers. Even so, it’s been retweeted a few times already by more influential people, and it’s started to get hits from various countries, including Australia and Hong Kong. In my time away from serious internet development, I had forgotten what a thrill it is to see something that you’ve built from your sofa reaching people around the world.
In the end, I don’t know if Tweeterpret will find any larger audience, but it’s already served its original purpose: it’s reminded me what it feels like to learn something new and put it to practical use, and helped me rediscover the pleasure of building new things and sending them out into the world.