How do you hone your skills?
Written by our consultant Johan Jäderblom.
I have had a passion project running for a few years now. Actually, it’s more like my passion project is the reason I got my first job.
It started as a windows forms app running on a second monitor while you played Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. If you’ve never played the game, during a round you earn money for the next, which you then spend on equipment at the start of that round. My app helped you by showing how much you would have left in the worst case the next round.
Then a friend of mine said he wanted to use it but he didn’t have a second monitor. So I set out to build an android app that he could run. There was only one issue, the way I was gathering the data was through a built-in feature of CSGO which just sends POST requests to a server. Easy enough to let your pc capture the requests on localhost. But how do you get the data to your Android device? I found Google Cloud Messaging, which would let me send data as messages to a topic. So let the user register your SteamID as a topic and let the client publish to that topic. (Yes I realize the security implications and how easy it would be to cheat, suffice it to say it no longer works like this).
Using what I learned from building this app, I did well enough at an interview to land my first job!
This was a real hacky way of doing it, I was super junior, still in school and just wanted to build something cool that me and my friends could use. Today it’s running on a server that tracks all your stats and aggregates them to give you a summary of your games, as well as overall stats on things like maps and guns. The “live view” is still basically the same thing as the original, shows a fast overview of the game and your economy. But there is a whole lot more now, you can see what maps you’re performing well on, as well as the guns you are the best with. As well as some miscellaneous stuff like, choose your preferred color, see your complete stats and add friends to see their games.
