My Intro to QONQR

When I was working at Magenic in 2010, a co-worker showed me a web/location-based game called QONQR. I thought it was a pretty cool concept and the plans that they had on their site made it sound even better. It was described as a cross between Foursquare and the board game RISK. That is a very accurate description. I played for a few weeks and got to a pretty high level until I started to lose interest. I wasn't very big on mobile games that required a web browser. I was also getting busy with the birth of my son and learning in the ins and outs of Android development.

I kind of lost track of QONQR when I left Magenic for an Android developer position at space150. I worked there for about six months and then something made me think of QONQR again. I went to their site and saw that there was no longer a web client. Instead there was a Windows Phone and iOS client. I was let down by the fact that there was no Android version. Since I did not have a Windows Phone or iOS device, I couldn't see what the new game was all about.  Then an idea struck me. I went to their site and hit the contact button. I quickly wrote up an email stating some information about myself and how I was a fan of the web version of the game. I offered up my services as an Android developer to help get the Android version out to the public. Since I was still new to the mobile development world, I thought any experience that I could get would be beneficial. I sent the email with high hopes and low expectations. Five days later I received an email from the CEO, Scott Davis, saying that he would like to set up a time to meet.

I met Scott over a cup of coffee and we talked about QONQR and where it is going. I was surprised at how down to Earth and accessible he was for a CEO. He asked me what I am looking to do and he decided that I should talk with their CTO and Android Developer, Donn Felker. After a phone interview with Donn, I was brought on to help with the Android version.  I had a few conference calls with Donn to go over the current codebase for the Android app and quickly realized that this was on a whole new level compared to the apps that I had previously written. It was a little intimidating but I felt that I could wrap my head around it.

I spent some time wading through the code for the Android version and even wrote some code for it, when Scott called me and said that he would like concentrate efforts on the iOS version of the app and get it up to speed with the Windows Phone app. I was still pretty green with iOS, but the current version was pretty extensive and I felt that I could learn a lot just from investigating the existing code. This was the start of the bulk of my iOS experience...