Our engineering blog is home to our stories sharing technical knowledge and lessons learned. But that's only part of the story: we hire passionate people who love what they do and are invested in mastering their craft. Today we launch "The Side Hustle," an occasional series highlighting some side projects from our devs while off the Shopify clock. When Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan noticed quadcopter controllers on mobile mostly translated analog controls to digital, he took it upon himself to find a better design. 7 minute read For under $50, you can get ahold of a loud little flying piece of plastic from Amazon, and they’re a lot of fun. Some of them even come with cameras and Wi-Fi for control via a mobile app. Unfortunately, these apps are pretty low quality — they’re unreliable and frustrating to use, and look out of place in 2017. The more I used these apps, the more frustrated I got, so I started thinking about ways I could provide a better solution, and two months later I emerged with two things: 1. An iOS app for flying quadcopters called SCARAB, and 2. An open-source project for building RC apps called QuadKit