How One App Made Me Realize I Can Do Whatever I Want

Like most big changes in my life, this one began with something simple:
I wanted to eat healthier.

I downloaded the popular nutrition apps, tried their flows, scanned their barcodes, logged their meals… and I just didn’t like them. None of them felt natural. None of them solved the way I wanted to track my eating. And if I didn’t enjoy using them, there was no way I’d stay consistent.

That’s when a different question appeared:
“Why don’t I just build the app I wish existed?”

It wasn’t meant to be a startup.
It wasn’t even meant to be a serious project.
It started as a weekend experiment, a small side project to fix my own problem.

And that was the moment everything changed.

The First Wall: React Native

I knew a bit of backend. I rarely wrote it, but I understood its shape.

Mobile development, though?
Completely uncharted territory.

React Native hit me hard. UI behaved differently. Routing felt foreign. Even simple touches didn’t register the way I expected. I wasn’t just writing code; I was learning to think on a mobile device for the first time.

It was frustrating.
But somehow… it was fun too.

The First Time I Surprised Myself

The breakthrough came during camera integration.

Expo-camera wasn’t flexible enough for what I wanted. So I went for react-native-vision-camera, which immediately broke everything. Xcode errors, Expo conflicts, build failures. The whole package.

I spent days deep in logs, GitHub issues, random blog posts, and obscure StackOverflow answers.

Then one night, it finally worked.
Clean, smooth, fully controlled camera feed.

And I had this strange realization:
I actually love solving these kinds of problems.
I wasn’t just a frontend dev anymore.
I was becoming something else, someone who could cross boundaries and figure things out.

The “Holy Shit” Moment

The first moment MealTrackPro truly came alive was when I logged a meal in my own app.

I tapped save.
The AI analyzed it.
A score popped onto the home screen.

It was simple, but to me… it was magic.

That moment made everything real.
I wasn’t building an idea anymore; I was using a tool I created for my own life.
And it worked.

How This Changed the Way I Build

Before this project, my identity was “frontend developer.”

Now?

That label feels too small.

I experiment more.
I iterate faster.
I don’t wait for “someday.”
I jump into unknowns immediately, trusting that I’ll figure them out one by one.

MealTrackPro didn’t just teach me backend, mobile, AI, widgets, or camera frameworks.
It taught me fearlessness.

My Wife: The First User, The Toughest Tester

She’s always the first to try new features and the first to break them.
She reports crashes, performance issues, confusing screens, everything.
She cares enough to push me, and she motivates me constantly.

Her feedback shaped the app just as much as my code.

The Unexpected Chaos: The Photo Incident

At one point, I needed to test the inappropriate content filter.
So I collected some… questionable photos.
Strange ones. Gross ones. The kind of images you definitely want no one to see in your camera roll.

Of course, the very next day, a friend looked at my phone.
His face froze.

“Good thing you explained these,” he said.
Otherwise, he would've drawn some wild conclusions.

We laughed hard, and I deleted everything immediately.
Debugging sometimes takes you into very weird places.

Widgets and the New Builder Mindset

Recently, I wondered:
“Wouldn’t it be cool to see my progress on a home screen widget?”

Old me: “I don’t know how widgets work… maybe later.”
New me: opens Xcode instantly.

Documentation marathons.
Preview errors.
Timeline logic.
New environment, new constraints.

But slowly, it clicked, because curiosity has become a stronger driver than fear.

Widgets weren’t just a feature.
They were a reminder that I can keep learning forever.

The Real Lesson

School teaches you to study the known.
Building teaches you to explore the unknown.

You dive into a hole full of uncertainties.
You get stuck.
You fix things.
You break them again.
And one day you climb out with a new skill, and a new version of yourself.

MealTrackPro didn’t just help me track my meals.
It changed the way I see myself as a builder.

And the best part?
I know this is still only the beginning.