| Hah, this reminds me of high school! For my final year project, I knew I wanted to write some kind of software, and my Programming Languages professor suggested that I pick a generic topic like "A program in C++" and then I can build whatever. This was at a time when we just started using mobile data (GPRS) on our phones and SMS was very expensive. It's also when I met my girlfriend, now wife, and we were constantly messaging of course. I needed a cheaper way to communicate. This was before there was WhatsApp, Signal, etc. So I wrote Tiruriru. It consisted of: - a Java mobile application that you could use to send messages to your contacts over GPRS
- a GSM modem written in Python that would call and ring the contact's phone number 3 times when you send a message to them because no one was connected to GPRS at all times
- and finally a REST api written in C++ with Wt Toolkit that was communicating with the app and the GSM modem service. Since this used very little data it was 10x cheaper to send messages like this than to use SMS. We ended up upgrading to Android phones soon after and 2g/3g/wifi was available everywhere. That's the story of how I wrote "A program in C++" in high school :) |