From Interior Designer and Photographer to Founder

Hi, I’m Nova Togatorop originally from Jakarta, Indonesia. These days I’m working on Nappies, an iOS app that I just built and released, besides being a teaching assistant at Le Wagon.

I used to work as an Interior Designer in my home country, before taking a break from work to travel the world by hitchhiking. During this trip, photography became one of my passions. I started working for Shutterstock, and had a chance to exhibit some of my photography in art exhibitions around San Francisco and Oakland, California.

After several years of photography career, I realized a new passion forming up in my head; software development. This was the new beginning for me before joining Le Wagon. I love to be involved in any creative process. Programming allows me to solve real problems through creative thinking. This is when I decided that I wanted to learn to code.

My main ambition when I joined the bootcamp was to build a real product. I find Le Wagon to be a product-oriented coding bootcamp and its mission matches what I want; producing concrete outputs. I also wanted to learn how to combine the design skills that I have with the programming skills that I would learn in Le Wagon. 

The best part of the 9 weeks was the experience itself. It was evolving and fast-paced. On a daily basis, we were doing coding challenges and we could raise a ticket if we were stuck on an exercise. Le Wagon’s learning methodology applies a learning-by-doing mindset, which is also useful after you graduate. Besides coding, Le Wagon arranges some meetups and events, which are useful for networking.

My advice to get the most out of the bootcamp would be to embrace your weakness and be inquisitive. It’s a place to improve and learn. I was aware that I lacked knowledge of backend skills. I challenged myself and took the opportunity to maximize by taking some backend tasks in my final project and it was highly successful.

I am now working on Nappies, an app available on mobile and desktop for finding baby-friendly places around you, based on provided facilities for babies, like a baby chair, changing table, toys or play areas. Straightforward and simply designed, parents can easily find places based on their needs to hang out with their little ones.

Back in April 2018, as a new expat family who just moved from abroad to Berlin, I wanted to have an exciting time with my baby and hang out in cafes that have a baby seat and diaper changing station. It took a lot of effort to find a good one. That’s how the idea came up. When I signed up at Le Wagon, I was planning on finding a job as a web developer but also saw the possibility to learn new skills to become a founder. 

My advice for any founder is to concept, code, and design. These are the crucial things to have if you want to create your app. Then figure out what you want to create and do research on which languages and tools would be good options for building the app.

In my case, I knew that I needed to implement a mobile app to enhance the user experience. It took less than 4 weeks self-studying to understand the core structure and implementation in Swift, a programming language to build Apple platforms including iOS apps. Last but not least, keep yourself motivated and never stop trying.

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