NetDimensions — Mobile Development Manager

2011 – 2018 | Mobile learning experiences and cross-platform apps

I led mobile development at NetDimensions, building cross-platform learning applications for iOS and Android. NetDimensions was a Hong Kong-based company, and I joined in 2011 as a remote developer in the US—collaborating daily with colleagues across a 12-hour time zone gap. By 2014, I’d moved into my first management role with direct reports based in Hong Kong. Working on and then leading a team split across that distance taught me early that effective distributed work requires intentional communication, not just better tools. I developed practices around asynchronous handoffs, clear written documentation, and structured collaboration that I’ve carried into every role since—over 15 years of remote work to date.

The “learning” context meant offline support was essential. People take training on planes, in warehouses, in places with spotty connectivity. The apps had to work without a network and sync when connectivity returned. This constraint shaped everything about the architecture.

What I Built

Offline-First Mobile Learning Apps

I designed and built mobile learning apps for iOS and Android that worked fully offline with content download, local progress tracking, conflict resolution, and sync-on-reconnect. This unlocked a market segment that couldn’t use browser-based LMS products—users training in environments where connectivity was unreliable or nonexistent.

The offline-first constraint forced careful thinking about data flow. When a user completes a course module on an airplane, that progress has to be stored locally, queued for sync, and reconciled with the server state when connectivity returns—potentially days later, and potentially with conflicting changes. I built conflict resolution and data consistency strategies to handle these scenarios reliably.

Cross-Platform SCORM/xAPI Players

I adapted online-only learning standards (SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, xAPI) for mobile. These standards define how learning content communicates progress and completion—and they were designed for desktop browsers, not mobile apps. Making them work in a native mobile context required rethinking assumptions about runtime environment, storage, and connectivity that the standards took for granted.

I built the players using Xamarin (C#) and earlier Flex Mobile (ActionScript 3). The goal was to share as much code as possible across platforms while still feeling native on each. This was a constant balancing act—shared code reduces development cost per platform, but platform-specific behavior is what makes apps feel right to users.

What I Learned

Mobile constraints force good design. On mobile, you can’t ignore performance. Battery life, network bandwidth, storage limits—these aren’t abstract concerns, they’re immediate user experience problems. The discipline of designing for constrained environments made me a better architect in general.

Offline-first is a mindset, not a feature. Building apps that work offline isn’t just about caching. It changes how you think about data flow, conflict resolution, and user feedback. The PWA project I built later at Decian drew directly on this experience—the “Mission Control” training operations portal uses the same local-first patterns I developed here, just with modern web technologies instead of native mobile.

Leading a distributed team is different from doing the work. I worked remotely on a Hong Kong-based team from 2011, and by 2014 I was managing direct reports there. That progression—from distributed contributor to distributed manager—taught me that enabling others to do great work across time zones is a different skill than doing the work yourself. Managing across a 12-hour gap forced me to develop practices I now consider fundamental: asynchronous communication by default, decisions and context captured in writing, and structured overlap windows for the conversations that genuinely need to be synchronous. These aren’t pandemic-era adaptations; they’re habits I built starting in 2011 and have refined across every subsequent role.

Why This Mattered for Later Work

The offline-first patterns I developed here directly informed later architecture work: local-first data patterns, conflict resolution strategies, bandwidth-conscious design. The thread from NetDimensions mobile apps → Decian’s “Mission Control” PWA is direct—different technologies, same fundamental patterns.

The management experience also shaped how I lead at Decian—I learned early that enabling others to build well is as important as building things myself.

Technologies: Xamarin (C#), Flex Mobile (ActionScript 3), iOS, Android, SCORM 1.2/2004, xAPI (Tin Can), SQLite.

Related

• Stateless PWA with Sync Layer — Later application of the offline-first patterns from this role
• PeopleFluent — Where I continued working with SCORM/xAPI from the platform side
• BP-Tech — Where I first built for mobile (iPad) and offline use cases