These past months had been challenging, in my current project, we had a problematic deadline, and we were struggling with the integration of our code with other teams and the business side communication. Long days, some weekend work and so on.

So, what do I do when I want to relax and have some fun (other than reading dev.to), of course, I code!

First, a little bit of context, I landed to Coding Coach after reading this blog post.

Fantastic community, excellent idea, but, how can I contribute? Other than being a mentor (it looks like there are not so many mentees interested in Xamarin after all), I want to do something exciting and have the chance to grow.
Many contributors are already working on the web app, and they are using a stack that I don't want to learn right now, so I asked what about the mobile app, can I use Xamarin? So @emmawedekind replied something like, sure, choose your poison (not really :D), and I started as an exercise the development of the mobile app (contributors welcome!).

I have much experience as a Xamarin developer, but usually, your "pay the bills" projects don't allow you to check new things and learn about the latest changes and improvements; also, some developers on Coding Coach were asking why I was using Xamarin, here a brief list of my goals for this project:

• Create something useful for the Coding Coach community.
• Have a playground for mentees that want to learn about Xamarin.
• Have the opportunity to create high-quality code without the restraint of deadlines or business constraints.
• Learn about different approaches, tools, and technologies.
• Have fun!!

I'm taking this as the chance to find joy in my craft and do (I hope) something meaningful for the community.
Friday 2 am caught me fighting happily with the filter functionality for the mentor's page; if that's not fun, I don't know what it is!

If you aren't already in the Coding Coach slack, go there and say hello, and if you are interested in a Xamarin mentor, contact me! I'm sure we can learn something together.