Hunter Stanton is a star developer at Drover. Here is his story!
When I was a child, I was fascinated by the concepts of the computer and the internet. These things amazed me - how was it even possible to connect a metal box to a phone line and suddenly contact billions of people around the world? It blew my young mind and ignited a life-long love of all things tech.
As a kid who grew up in a small town in eastern Tennessee, I didn’t have any opportunities to see the outside world other than what was within a 30 mile radius of me. The internet unlocked that opportunity for me and suddenly let me see and interact with people from all walks of life.
As you can imagine, curiosity eventually got the best of me and I wanted to learn how it all worked. I wanted to learn how to create my own software, to contribute to the world and build useful software that made peoples’ lives easier. I wanted to learn how a computer worked, how it took the fundamental concept of 1s and 0s and used that information to open up a whole new digital world.
So that is exactly what I did. I spent hours, which turned into days, which turned into weeks, to months, and then to years, and learned. I leveraged the free, openly available information on the internet to learn how a computer worked, and how I could write my own software. I think the first language I ever really knew was Microsoft’s Visual Basic. At first it was simple programs, stuff that just played a song when you click a button or wrote text to the screen. It wasn’t much, certainly nothing to brag about, but I was learning.
Fast-forward to when I first got out of high school in 2014. Smartphones had taken hold, and everyone was walking around with a powerful computer in their pocket. Apple had recently announced the newest operating system for the iPhone, iOS 8. But they also announced something that caught my attention immediately - Swift. It was a new programming language, one geared to be much easier, much more readable, and much more powerful than it’s predecessor, Objective-C. I quickly took an interest in this new language, and began learning all I could about it. I found it much easier to work with than Objective-C, and it gave me a love of making iOS apps for the first time in my life.
In around late 2015, I founded a company of my own to publish apps with a friend. At that point, I had enough experience with Swift and iOS development to be able to make apps that people could use. I felt confident enough in my abilities to know that my apps would be stable, bug-free, and that they would run well on all iOS devices, even the oldest ones capable of running them. As of today, we have published 6 apps to the App Store, with many more on the way in the future.
In mid-2016, I got a text from my friend, who had an interview with a startup in Cookeville called Drover Rideshare. He told me about the company briefly and suggested I also apply for an interview. I decided it would be interesting to work in such a company, so I applied. I got the job and I fell in love with the idea and the work. Working everyday with talented developers on a mobile ridesharing application was definitely an opportunity I was very glad to have gotten. I am excited to see where the company goes, and I look forward to seeing the app go live for Android and iOS in the future.
