[MehdiEG]

No - I've never worked with Xamarin (although I'll be looking at it in the coming days / weeks for a personal project - it looks quite sweet now). But I've got loads of experience with both .NET and Objective-C / Cocoa.

Most of my experience has been on the .NET platform and primarily on the backend / distributed systems side of things.

However, between 2010 and 2013, I was co-founder and CTO of a tech startup where our main product was a fairly sophisticated native iOS app. Being a bootstrapped startup, I had to do all the tech work myself. So I got a lot of experience with Objective-C / Cocoa that way. On the back of that, I got a contract to develop a native iPad app for the BBC, providing me with some additional experience building an app for an external client.

When I landed on the job market in January last year, I was therefore happy to take either an iOS contract or a .NET one.

I ended up taking a .NET contract. And to be completely honest, large-scale software systems / distributed systems is really where my heart lies. So I'm now pitching myself as a .NET developer only as this is the type of role I'm most keen on.

I'd actually be really happy to take on a role that uses another stack as well. But as a contractor, it's not really realistic to expect a client to pay you to learn a new language / stack :)

[merpnderp]

You've had an interesting career it appears. Out of yet more curiosity, which BBC app?

[MehdiEG]

It's the LearnGaelic app created for BBC Scotland (or, more specifically for LearnGaelic, a partnership between the BBC and local organizations that promote the use of the Scottish Gaelic language): https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/learngaelic-beginners-course...

It's a language-learning app for the Scottish Gaelic language, which includes both a full 30 hour course, including native speaker audio and role-plays, and several mini-games to test yourself.

It's a really beautiful app (thanks to the immensely talented illustrator Julie-Anne Graham who worked with us on this). A lot of time and effort was also spent on the instructional design side of it, making it really easy for complete beginners to acquire a solid basic fluency in Scottish Gaelic. I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in the language (it's completely free).

The best thing about this app though is the invisible part: it wasn't built as a one-off app with hardcoded content. I won't go into the details but here is for example an Irish Gaelic version of it (with more screenshots): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-irish-gaelic-buntus/id...

(and anyone interested in the Irish language should give it a try :) )

I didn't have to do anything for the Irish version of the app despite the fact that it's got completely different content: different graphics, text, audio, game questions and lesson structure. The content team (instructional designer, illustrator, translator, proof-reader, audio producer) worked on putting together the content for that other app. When the content was ready, all I had to do was hit "Build". Same codebase - two completely different apps.

[merpnderp]

Thanks for the response. I'll give your app a whirl and know to appreciate how well it was engineered :)

Sure seems like the BBC is always at the forefront of everything they do.