At 1stMILE, the executive team was interested in developing an application that was both beneficial for a automotive shop and their customers. This ultimately lead to the idea of creating a mobile application that the team called 1stMILE CAR. The goal of CAR was to be an app in which users were able to save information about their vehicles and look up resources when it came to repairs or checkups.
Users would be able to store information such as current vehicle mileage, documents associated with any repairs, and other miscellaneous documentation. Additionally, users would be able to lookup shops in the 1stMILE network to handle certain repairs. For the shop owners, they'd be able to reach out to their customers who have downloaded the CAR app. This would open opportunities such as notifications, appointments and more.
After doing some research, I decided to use Xamarin for developing this application. There were a couple key contributors as to why I chose to use Xamarin. First, Xamarin provided a more native approach to supporting multiple platforms. Our team wanted the application to feel natural in each environment, and didn't want to rely on exporting a project to help support a specific platform. Secondly, the underlying technology of Xamarin was C# and .NET which are the same technologies used to develop 1stMILE. We anticipated many communication calls and operations to be similar to calls made in 1stMILE at the time. By using Xamarin, we could potentially save a lot of development time if we were able to reuse different libraries and components used in 1stMILE.
For this project, I worked on the initial foundations and architecture. Like many good systems, I wanted to ensure that the data and control of the app were separated from the view of the overall application. This was especially important at the time since the decisions on what the app should look like where constantly evolving. The video below shows what early versions of the application looked like (in addition to some other products). Jump to approximately 1:30 in the video to see 1stMILE CAR.
1stMILE CAR was a fun project to work on overall. My time with the project was limited as I was moved onto other high priority projects, but I was glad I was able to help build the foundation for the project that allowed other engineers to continue on with its development.
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