WaterRower Connect App
During my time working for MoveLab Studio, I did both user experience design and front-end/back-end development. The company size was small, so I was allowed to pick up all sorts of work. The WaterRower Connect app was our main project: a WaterRower is a rowing machine for at-home use that can be connected via bluetooth or USB.
Programming at MoveLab taught me many things: patterns, dealing with server requests, clean coding. It also improved my objected oriented programming and reactive programming skills, and many many other things. I started coding Android apps in the beginning of 2020 and since then I have learnt a ton! My bachelor and master education prepared me to be able to learn any coding language (or at least have the faith that I can do so!) and Kotlin was no exception. But having to deal with lifecycles and activities and other Android specific things, brought on new challenges: I'm still learning every day as I'm typing this. It is super fulfilling to think up a feature, write a pitch for it (we use the ShapeUp method by Basecamp, previously Scrum was used) and execute it. It's rare that everything goes smooth from the get-go, but I think this is very much a part of programming.
In January 2022, the Premium version of WaterRower Connect was launched. One of its features was ''Rowing Together'', where Premium users can row the same workout at the same time. The idea is that a user can create an ‘’online’’ lobby that other users can join via a link. The lobby is connected to a workout that the host has created. When the host presses ‘’Start’’ in the lobby, this workout will start for all users. They are able to see each others’ live data, giving them the feeling of actually rowing together. I implemented many parts of this feature, from designs to big parts of the navigation and the requests to create the session links and retrieve a session as a guest. This video shows the feature in action, when we tried it with our company team.