Howdy everybody! I hope your week is going well! Mine has sure been busy with the Wisconsin launch of Envoy Now, a student food delivery service that I am currently working for.
Envoy Now actually has its roots a year before me, during last fall. This past semester, however, I was turned onto the company, started by current students here at USC, by a mutual friend. As they were moving their application development back in-house, we found a great arrangement for me to join the team as the iOS developer to manage the systems on both the front-end application and the back-end data server. While I can’t share too much about it for non-disclosure reasons, this has been a fantastic experience to see a young startup from the inside and to help propel it forward as it expands. Over the past few weeks, I have taken their existing shell, which was a minimum viable product, and built out systems for customers to track orders via text, establishments to automate opening and closing times, and the company itself to expand to campuses beyond USC without the campuses interfering with each other. In addition to this, I’ve been working to refine the existing systems of order tracking, placing orders, and creating a streamlined experience from exploration all the way to rating and tipping your Envoy.
It was cool to apply all of my knowledge of iOS and Objective-C that I’ve learned through class, but in addition I’ve become much more proficient with some of the finer details of iOS 7 and 8 as well as the Parse API that I never worked with in class. It’s always rewarding to see how my experience through class and outside practice enables me to quickly adapt and learn new concepts when necessary, relating them to prior knowledge to build off of what I already know.
I’m looking forward to continuing with Envoy Now as we build on our current system and roll out more upgrades and features! We’ve got big plans in the works for future revisions, so stay tuned because I might drop a teaser in a later blog!
All in all, the key takeaway here is to just go out and do it! Whatever opportunity it is that comes your way, take hold of it and use it to learn and grow yourself, and have fun along the way!
Until next time!
~Patrick
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