As you may well have read in my “About” section, I was once a Registered Nurse and later, a Resuscitation trainer – this little factoid will come in useful once I get to the bit where I describe what I have been working on recently. Please bear with me. I had always taken photographs and thought that it would be a jolly wheeze if I was to retire early and make a living as a photographer. I have a photography blog which gives a fuller picture of the photography adventure (link on header to each page if you are interested – please visit at least once) but suffice to say, it didn’t bring the fame and fortune that I craved. During that time I started to play with Android photo editing apps on my phone after a very talented photographer called Gerry Coe came to the local camera club that I attended. He had won numerous awards for his photography and had moved on to win awards with his iPhone photography. I was hooked. I started to play with Snapseed, Picsart, PhotoLabPro, Prisma, and a whole lot more using my photographs and posting them on my Photo Instagram page*. My next thought was to see if I could find out how to write an Android photo app for myself. I mentioned this to a friend of mine one evening at the camera club and the following morning, he sent me a link to Google Garage where they were offering scholarships to study for one of four Google Nanodegrees.

• Android Basics Nanodegree
• Android (advanced) Nanodegree
• Android Basics Web development Nanodegree
• Android (advanced) Web development Nanodegree

At the age of 56 I decided to apply for the Android Basics Nanodegree; I did not have any previous experience of writing code, just a kid with a crazy dream!

I applied and was accepted. The course was run by Udacity and the first stage was “The Google Developer Challenge”

The scholarship was for three months and there were 20,000 selected across Europe for each of the two basic strands and 10,000 for each of the more advanced strands. I did well in the first phase and was given another scholarship to study for a further six months for the full Nanodegree. There were only 2000 people on each strand invited to continue and I was one of the fortunate ones.

There will be more about my journey through my Nanodegree with Udacity in my next post.

*I have two Instagram pages; a photography page (@paulcullenphoto) for which there is a link through my photography website and a new “Developer” page (@cullendevelopment) to which this website is linked.

I have a third site “uncorked bottle” (link under header on each page) if you are interested in my wine blog.