Ever since I started working part-time alongside college, I started looking at prices as work hours. This was an effective way for me to budget my money and make sound decisions on spending on luxuries and needs. Looking at work hours as a form of currency did change my perspective of things. It made me think whether spending my money on a product was worth the hours of work I did to earn that same amount of money.

Years went by and I realized it was kinda inconvenient for me to constantly whip out my calculator before making a decision to buy a product. Thus, came an idea for me to code an application for myself so that I don’t have to keep opening my calculator app and trying to remember how much I was earning per hour at my job. However, I had just one problem. I didn’t know how to code.

Over the past couple of weeks, I overcame the biggest hurdle of making my idea a reality – which was to learn how to code. Through various guides and how-to-code applications, I learned how to find my way round Java as well as Android Studio. I spent sleepless nights squashing bugs and figuring out why my application didn’t work or kept crashing. After countless days and nights, I came up with a simple savings-goals application that keeps a list of stuff that the user want to save up for and allows the user to convert prices into work hours. On top of that, users are able to see how many shifts they’d have to work to be able to save up for the item. Well. Not bad for a beginner.

I decided to name the application Hourrency. It’s like a combination of “Hour” and “Currency.” I spent hours on cleaning up the user interface to make sure that it’ll look comfortable on the users’ eyes. Over time, I’ll definitely add new features based on feedback, and I’m curious to know what you think! One thing I learnt from this experience is that doing something as simple as this is tedious and time-consuming and we probably owe it to the developers that take the time to develop the software that we take for granted day-to-day.

You can download the Android App here.