In the summer of 2018, I needed a reason to apply to the Computer Science program, so I gave myself one: build something.

I had some experience with websites during my AFS Exchange year program in Arizona, but now I wanted to make mobile apps. My research began. Everyone said React Native, but I wanted something different, something new. Flutter caught my eye. It was only four years old, still fresh, still forming, and I liked that. It felt like getting in early.

I didn’t know what to build, so I did what most builders do: I looked around. Listened. Observed. 
In Chile, most neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and condominiums are run by a board, basically an nicer HOA. They used WhatsApp: one group for general messages, another for security, private chats for complaints, payments, the usual.

The general complaint was that people would be annoying on the General chat. "The dog from house 25 is too loud", "someone parked wrong" and the random "entrepreneur" trying to sell something. Chaos and neighbors hating each other. 
The board just wanted an easy way to collect dues and send reminders.

So I started building. No market research, no competitor analysis, just an excuse to learn Flutter. After a couple of weeks, “Tranqui” was ready to be shown. As a student, I had almost no budget. I got a second-hand Mac, paid the developer fees, published it, and booked a meeting with the Board.

In that meeting, I presented my solution, and it made sense to them. But they had already signed with "Condominio Feliz":  a payments-first solution. Their real problem wasn’t the social chaos, it was the accounting. Fair enough.

I got to build something real. I felt so empowered and showed it to my classmates. Bruno, a blind classmate, wanted to try it. We tested it on his iPhone to see if he could use it. Flutter turned out to be inaccessible by default. He eventually became my best friend. Our shared passion for building stuff has snowballed since.

Drinking games are a big thing in Chile. We usually use cards to give or take shots in various ways. But playing with Bruno was hard because he couldn't read his cards. So, as a way for him to try Flutter, we built Brucards: a digital  deck that he could use to join us. It worked fine but the accessibility problems were daunting, so after a couple of iterations, we set it aside.

With more than 2 apps in my experience bucket, I was confident that Flutter was still my thing. I answered questions on Stack Overflow, and got some small businesses as clients from Chile. But the more projects I coded, the more uncomfortable it felt.

Bruno and I tried different combinations of stacks: Flutter + Firebase; Flask + Firebase; Flutter + Nodejs (to build an app to control music by different people on one device using websockets); Flutter + Strapi (recommended by an Indian friend I made online); Flutter + Rails API + Graphql; React + Rails; Rails + Flutter for mobile. We tried all of them to optimize our own workflow and have a consistent approach to our next ideas.

After a couple of months, and some Rails courses, we built Ment, and since then, multiple other projects.

To build something is to drive a road with an invisible, ever-changing destination. Closed roads force you to find new routes. Unexpected conversations at the gas station become new paths entirely. Each arrival is just a starting point for more exploration that brings more learning, more failure, more success. And when others join your trip, those possibilities multiply.

Grab your people and get in the car. The map will draw itself. Just build something.