The App I Built During a Flood That Got Me Hired

Stranded in a Flood with an Idea

I was a MyBOLT! modem subscriber, and like most modem users, I had a small daily habit: checking my remaining quota and grace period. The problem was that this only existed on the official website. There was no app for it at all.

In February 2014, Jakarta had one of its worst floods in years. I was stuck at home with nothing urgent to do, so I decided to finally build the thing I had been wanting for a while.

Scraping the Quota Page with jsoup

I used jsoup to fetch the raw HTML from the official site, stripped out the tags, parsed the data I actually needed, and displayed it in a simple UI. I also added support for multiple logins, since I figured other people juggling more than one MyBOLT! number would want that too.

The whole thing came together in a few hours. I wasn't building it for anyone but myself. I published it to the Play Store almost as an afterthought, mostly just to have it on my own phone in a cleaner way than opening a browser every time.

Unexpected Traction on the Play Store

I didn't expect what happened next. Downloads started climbing fast, way faster than I imagined for something I built in an afternoon. Ratings were good. People were leaving reviews thanking me for building something official MyBOLT! hadn't gotten around to making yet.

A LinkedIn Message from the CTO

A month later, in March 2014, Devid Gubiani, who was CTO of MyBOLT! at the time and would become CEO shortly after, reached out to me on LinkedIn. The gist of his message was straightforward: an outside developer had built the app they needed before their own internal team did, and he wanted to talk.

That conversation led to me joining Lippo Group under MyBOLT! that same year. I moved from the scrappy jsoup-based Android app into building the official application using Ionic for both Android and iOS, along with the web application used internally for subscriber management.

What I Learned From It

It's a strange thing to think about now. The whole reason I built that first version was boredom during a flood and a small personal itch I wanted to scratch. I wasn't trying to prove anything or get noticed. I just wanted an easier way to check my own quota.

But that's usually the pattern with the projects that end up mattering most. They rarely start as a plan. They start as something small you build because it bothers you, and it only becomes something bigger because you happened to solve a problem other people had too.