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Meet Dave Coffin, Developer Expert for NativeScript_870x220
Dave Coffin, Developer Expert for NativeScript, talks about building mobile apps with NativeScript from start to finish.

This post is part of a series featuring our Telerik Developer Experts, community members who represent the best of our products. Read about other featured experts here and meet more TDEs here.

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What’s your background, professionally?

I'm a full stack web development and with a background in design. I've been doing primarily frontend development and design for almost ten years.

Where are you based and why?

I'm based in Dover, New Hampshire, because it's an awesome state to live in and raise kids in. I work mostly remotely.

With whom are you working?

I freelance a lot, but also have started my own company with my wife that aims to help the communication-related annoyances involved with both daycares and nannies.

What project are you working on now?

I am working on a few different apps, but the one I'm most excited about is an app for nannies that will simplify their shift management and payment tracking. It will allow nannies to track hours across families, send invoices, track expenses and more.

What’s the most interesting project you’ve done recently?

The most interesting project is an app I created called Daily Nanny. It gives parents instant access to important information about their kids, improves communication with their nanny, lets them share photos and more.

What are some challenges you are encountering now in your work?

It's a constant challenge trying to evolve the UX in your apps with new behaviors. There are a lot of devices out there, and making your apps efficient from a user experience perspective on devices of all sorts of sizes and OS versions is probably the biggest challenge for app developers these days.

Which of our products do you use and why?

I use NativeScript to develop apps exclusively. It makes it so easy to get started on app development and business logic, and makes it an enjoyable experience moving back and forth between web development and app development. For most of my apps I am creating the API, the database model, the marketing website, and web apps entirely myself. NativeScript lets me move between these technologies and languages seamlessly. I can be working on the backend business logic, the frontend website, and the app all literally at the same time without any mental overhead switching between development environments and languages.

What’s the biggest software pain point, in your opinion, in the mind of your partners or clients?

One of the biggest pain points in my mind is the process of distributing apps in the marketplace. Each platform has its own quirks, but in web, launching a website is incredibly easy. But there is quite an overhead in getting an app from development to even a simple testing phase.


Jen Looper is a Developer Advocate at Telerik.
About the Author

Jen Looper

Jen Looper is a Developer Advocate for Telerik products at Progress. She is a web and mobile developer and founder of Ladeez First Media which is a small indie mobile development studio. In her spare time, she is a dancer, teacher and multiculturalist who is always learning.

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