Drive Viewer

I was given the opportunity to intern with a mobile app developer and as my project during my time their, they had me create and manage my own app project. Being that I hadn't had any Android app experience at the time, they had me design an application that could open up and view files in one's own Google Drive. Working two days a week while also attending classes, I was able to get some basic functionality with the Google API for Android.

As with anything, this project had it's own set of issues. Imagine not only learning a programming interface, but also learning how to interface with coworkers to speak a different language. My colleagues at the internship only spoke Korean, a langauge that I had come to consider myself okay at at an amateur level. To add to that, none of them were familiar with the Google API and couldn't really help me with Java as they were all programming in Unity or they were part of the art team.

Despite these pitfalls, I consider the work that I did a marginal success. I was able to successfully get an app working on my test phone after months of trudging through the Google API to interface with OAuth 2.0 for logging into one's Google account. The next big issue that I had was being able to actually read or open the files in the drive. Initially I wasn't able to get ther reader to show anything but txt files, but eventually I was able to get the viewer working with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files but not with PDF or image files.

This was a unique experience as I didn't have any one holding my hand and I had to schedule and manage my own time while also learning how to read the API and also test for bugs. The only real guidance that I recieved from the company that I was interning for was learning how to implement the Agile development mindset and to estimate my own coding abilities to plan a schedule for when I would meet certain milestones in the project. I loved working with this company as well as getting to experience working and managing on my own application project. This experience gave me key insights into the software development world.

source available at: https://github.com/DanielKimster/DriveViewer