About Me

 

iOS developer

Hi! my name is Francisco J. Belchi, but call me Fran or iFranDroid. I am a iOS Developer currently based on my home town, Cartagena, Spain. I work remotely and I’ve been developing mobile apps and building new projects since I finished my computer engineer studies in 2009.

I love computer programming since I was a kid. Away are those years in which I spent studying Basic for the Amstrad computer or C for when I could have an Intel 386.

As soon as I finished my bachelor, I knew that the future of computer would be in our pockets so I started to code for Android with my second hand device T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), it was the first Android-powered phone made available to consumers.

I enjoyed that smartphone a lot, it allowed me to create my first solo app, Glucose Meter for Android, an app to monitor the glucose level and have a historical in order to know if the management is good or bad. My next step for the app was to add the best feature that no other app had in the old Google Play, the ability to read the glucose levels directly from the device via Bluetooth.

It wasn’t easy, by that time there were no official API or support for Bluetooth on Android 1.5, but I was lucky, I was in the right place at the right time and some friends at Google London lent me their super cool Motorola Droid with Android 2.0 and I could implement that feature. The app was able to read from the device and upload the data into Google Health with the aim of sharing the data with the doctor and family.

The app helped a lot of people and that made me to feel very happy, later the app was finalist as the most creative idea in the Diabetes Mine Challenge in 2010. I think without knowing, I was becoming a tiny entrepreneur 🙂

During 2010 was my first working experience abroad, in London, I had the opportunity to work for Grapple Mobile, an international mobile app agency where I could work in their technology to enable the development of cross platform apps. At the same time I had another great challenge, build a native app for British Telecom, it was great!

Back to Spain the next year, after a cold and hard winter, totally unusual for me. I had the opportunity to join to Telefonica R&D in Barcelona and Madrid. Two more lovely city where I had the opportunity to live and know more great friends.

During my time working at Telefonica I noticed a big jump in terms of quality of work, methodology, knowledge acquired in general. The people there made me grow up a lot as a software engineer.

I was lucky to work in two great projects, the first one was related to Location Based Services and I learnt a lot. The second one was unbelievable, I could not believe that I was working in the NFC mobile wallet of Telefonica at the same time other big companies like Google were doing the same and other like Apple haven’t started yet.

After thousands of NFC mobile payments in tests and learn about a SIM middleware an all the security behind the scene, I had the opportunity to live the start of a new company in London, so I’ve joined to WorkAngel as first developer. It was a beautiful and hard experience at the same time, but I keep both of them because both are important. I learnt a lot about how a company start growing around a dream and hardest part was to make it happen obviously, working until late everyday. It was worth to fight for it and see how all the pieces of the puzzle joint together making a great company.

I had the opportunity to know and work with great people who I learnt a lot for 4 years, I made two teams, for Android and iOS platforms and lead the way with the experience acquired in my previous jobs with my successes and errors.

Sad times arrived with time for changes so it was my time also to change and try something new, something different. I started to work as freelance iOS developer doing apps for Canopy Group, an agency in San Francisco.

I met new great friends there who transmitted me that unique entrepreneurship passion which I felt there during vacation. I was starting to work with a friend in our spare time with drones, so I’ve learnt a lot about drones, we made one, we made the autopilot controller and finally I found a great idea that we could develop.

So we started Edronic, a startup which mission is to resolve the drone autonomy limitation to make possible autonomous drone operations without a pilot and without worrying about the battery.

The market isn’t ready for such kind drone operations in Spain, although we solved the autonomy limitation, we couldn’t solve the law limitation. However we learnt a lot on the technical and business sides.

Drones are one of my new passions and it is the future of mobile & cloud apps. There are more great technologies out there which are the future, whatever the future is, I want to be part of it helping to build it 🙂


Skills

Swift
90%

iOS
90%

Android
70%

Raspberry Pi
80%

Arduino
70%

Ruby
60%

Rust
35%

Drones
85%