We've decided to start a series of blog posts about the paths that our developers have taken as part of our Unleash program and their journey thus far.
As the first example, I’d like to introduce you to one of the most humble and passionate developers I’ve ever worked with. This is the Unleash story of Mr. Kelvin De Moya.
The humble beginnings
I remember starting my work as an Unleasher in X-Team at the beginning of 2016 and Kelvin was one of the first few developers I worked with. I usually make notes from my meetings so here’s what I wrote on the 6th of January 2016:
“I had a very good personal connection with Kelvin. We hit it off very quickly and he was very enthusiastic about the whole thing. He impressed me with how many ideas he had and how many development areas he wants to explore.”
The spark that brought the fire
After a mind mapping session we had together, it quickly turned out that Kelvin was strongly interested in growing in the mobile development area.
Since he was a front-end developer, I suggested React Native as a choice he could try in one of our early meetings. The following week he was blown away by React Native and already started working on a Hello World app for Android.
Kelvin then said he was working for quite some time on the design of an encyclopedia app for League Of Legends. I really loved the idea and it was only a natural step to put that design into action on the mentioned Android app. We started breaking down goals every week.
So every week we synced and figured out what to do next. I helped him out as his accountability buddy and here are just a few items that we crossed from that list during the past months:
- Created the Android app in React Native and the first Champions List screen
- Cleaned up the repo of LoL application
- Published the React Native LoL application for others to check out
- Implemented Redux in his League Of Legends App
- Implemented “Lore” screen
- Implemented “Skins” screen
- Researched publishing process on Google Play
- implemented LoL API and retrieving data from it
- Fixed the UI glitch issue
- ... and many more you can check in this GitHub repo
Fast forward to August 2016, the Leaguepedia app was released! We gathered tons of high fives within the X-Team community.
Huge satisfaction filled our hearts and I was really proud of Kelvin, but most of all, this was a tremendous motivation booster for him. And so he went on to become unstoppable.
Sharing the fire
Moving forward with his Unleash Path, Kelvin has grown to build up his open source activity.
Around the same time we started development of the Unleash App 2.x - the second iteration of our tool for personalizing paths of our heroes. The tech stack included React.js and Redux - both of which he is very passionate about. Kelvin was one of the first and, until this day, most frequent contributors. Not only he is a great team player but has also put the project on the right track numerous times.
His tremendous activity has inspired many among our developers to also contribute to the Unleash App. Also people that are mainly backend based started to feel the energy and contribute to this now shared experience.
But Kelvin didn’t stop there. He wanted to share his knowledge with his friends from the Dominican Republic who worked among the ranks of X-Team. Four weekends in a row, he hosted pair programming sessions showing them the app which resulted with a face-melting amount of pull requests on GitHub. This made my heart grow every time I code reviewed one of them.
From all the high fives he received and words of appreciation grew the need to unleash further. As a result of sharing his experiences with others, Kelvin decided to submit a talk about React at his Alma Mater to young computer science students. He gathered a lot of applause and tons of questions from these young curious minds. He even wrote a blog post about the experience of preparing that talk.
Finishing strong
Every year at X-Team’s annual X-Mas Party we acknowledge the most inspiring developers among us and reward them with our coveted Watchman Awards. After that wonderful trip, I’m honored to have shared with Kelvin, he ended the year receiving the Community Leadership Excellence award.
This is only one example of how the Unleash program is changing the lives of our developers and community. We are proud of our developers and we love to help them achieve their dreams. This is who we are.
