The great news is that our iOS application is finally ready as a beta. It means it can be tested by actual end-users; people who were not involved in any way in the process of development. The “but” part is that we decided not to proceed it further or release it until our Android version is ready as well. The reason is kind of obvious and I’m not going to dig into it.

However, today for the first time, I’m going to reveal a bit more about the project ( or at least its development phases). During the past few months, some of my friends asked me what the hell are you doing and why haven’t you guys released it already? It’s a tough question to answer, especially now, as you need to see it yourselves. However, I decided to present you this chart that displays all the phases we’ve planned so far, their purposes, durations, and our rough estimation of the final launch time:

I’ve got to admit that we made some enormous mistakes, and it resulted in a considerable delay in our timeline. Well, it’s the first time even for someone like me with all that programming experience, to design and develop a system in this category and with this scale (requires a dedicated post).

For instance, at the beginning of phase 4, we made a big mistake in selecting React Native (RN) as our mobile application framework. We thought we could kill two birds or probably more (Android, iOS, etc.) with one stone. Only after 3 phases we finally came to the realization of how limiting was the framework and how cumbersome would be the maintenance of such codebase. To clarify I’m not against RN at all. It’s really great, just probably not in our scenario. ( requires another dedicated post again). So we changed our entire planning and we went for developing native applications (separate apps for Android and iOS) which of course resulted in having us extend the timeline again.

Anyway, long story short, as you can see we’ve planned a total of 11 phases for android + 2 launch preparation phases. Because of our established code base, android development phases are not going to be like previous phases and tend to be shorter, hopefully, fingers crossed

I’d like to thank Dr. Lee and Demitry, two wonderful teammates who never gave up on the project and our vision despite all the hardship we experienced together

Alright, that’s it for now.

PS: From now on, a widget at the bottom of the home page displays our progress

The last three months were full of unforeseen challenges for me.
Went to Malaysia to update my team in person and guess what? Everything tore apart! Meetings went fine as usual, but a couple of days in, we encountered a huge operational problem.
Trump administration’s embargoes against Iran, hit us too which is pretty devastating as we have no ties to any Iran-based entities or organizations. We’re not even based in Iran. But as I was born in Iran, and I’m the director of the company, banks of Malaysia decided to close my personal and our company’s account. You have no idea how simple things like a small money transaction now is a big headache for us. It sucks as I’m the only member of our team with Iran nationality and I don’t want to even start with pointing out how unfair, unreasonable, silly, and irrational the case-based applying of these embargoes is.
To make our last couple of weeks of 2018 even more challenging, The company that owns the software we partially used to coordinate our team members and hold our remote working sessions, named Slack also decided to terminate our team account because they noticed someone (me) logged in form Iran. These events hindered our progress substantially. You see? December has been once again full of surprises for me.

Guess what I did after all?
Burst into a rage for a day or two, accepted the things I can’t change; unfair embargoes, put some more effort on things I can change; readjusting ourselves, moving to alternative software solutions, and Bingo! Despite all the challenges we released alpha 7. Hope 2019 be a drastically better year for me personally and professionally.

Happy new year
Cheers!

Do yourself a big favor … show him a big “F#–#K YOU” and leave him behind… let him be happy with this unreal idea of being awesome, great persuader, whatever… Sorry…but this is the case for many of my recent so-called friends…, so sad.

– With Sadaf and MiladTN

@BCTV – Season 4, #Permaisuri , #Kualalumpur , #Malaysia

I’m not a kind of guy to talk about the process of creating something while it’s still under development as I can’t see the point. After all, nobody knows how many more mistakes we may make in the remained phases. I’m just trying to update those of you who are interested, of our significant milestones, like finishing an actual stage.

Another reason I’m not talking about my programming carrier and my life as a software developer is that It’s not that much fun, exciting, and comprehensible to my mainstream followers compared to my artistic facet of life, and things I created, produced there or will be in future (This is not a tech blog, I’m not a geek). But I promise to post about the journey I’m in and this software project, the lessons learned, etc. once we released our first public version. It has been both a turbulent and pleasant journey at the same time, and I’ve got a lot to say especially technical wise but for now, let us enjoy this moment of accomplishing phase 6.

Especial thanks to our team: Lee, Tom, James, Abdul-Jabbar, Wong, and Hamidreza who contributed to this accomplishment

To the next phase, cheers!

PS: Still hiring (Deadline: Oct 19, 2018)

We’d just started, and honestly, we didn’t have much team members, so I vividly remember how each of us was burdened with tasks of several actual cast members. I was fortunate that I had those passionate co-founders in-house and along my side (Reza, and Hasan) who at least tried their best to remain enthusiastic for the first three months.

Although after a spate of difficulties and troubles their level of optimism waned and I eventually had no choice but to continue without them, I can’t ever forget how kind they were at the beginning, trusted me and supported what I was dedicating those days of my life to.

“If you’re trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I’ve had them, everybody has had them. But obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it”

Michael Jordan

8 years ago today, Kuala lumpur, Malaysia

PS: Alpha versions are our app’s in-house versions which we release internally before the app’s public release.