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During the 2008-2010 App Store gold rush, all you needed were a pick, ax, and laptop to strike it rich. Forget a business plan and forget being original: Just make an app, any app, and your chances of making some profit were better than none. Times have changed, and the single-app mindset can be catastrophic today, if you’re still chasing it. App vs. Business “Apps”, compared to a business providing an app, were novelty items during the emergence of the iPhone and Android. There were so little of them, that your best shot at success was just to be present. Today, there are so many apps,…

I have a really bad habit. After I release something, be it a project, an update, or even an article, I wait. I wait for something magical to happen. I wait for the universe to finally give me what’s due. Because one of these days, one of these updates or features or emails I send—one of these is going to make it. And it’s going to be huge. Right? Wrong. I just learned this lesson myself only a few days ago. For the last decade of shipping projects, my ritual and plan was always to 1. Develop the project, and 2. Perform a one-time marketing session of posting it around, emailing people,…

The first half hour of every day are the most difficult. I sort of have to remind myself who I am and what I’m doing. It’s a lot of work when you think about it. Every day, you choose to renew your commitment to be yourself. You choose to live a day similar to the one you lived yesterday. Really, there are no days. Yesterday is separated only by sleep and the eerie parallel universe of dreams. For the first 30 seconds after I awake, I am completely dumbfounded. But it starts coming back to me. I see my bed, and I remember my home. I see my wife, and I remember my love. I see my room and…

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I repeated these words frantically to myself as I was taking a walk, trying to figure out not only what my problems were, but what the answers were as well. How do I get more traffic to my website? Should I be getting more traffic to my website? Should I be improving the product? Am I charging the right price? Maybe it’s too expensive? Maybe it’s too cheap? I don’t know. Should I be going out and meeting people? Networking? Connecting? Maybe someone else will know? I don’t know. I’ve gotten help along the way, but everyone sort of says the same…

Sounds reckless right? But I want to make the case for why quitting your job can be a great way to advance your project, even when it may sound like a scary idea. You see, I had always thought that, during times I was employed, the extent to which my side projects would reach was inherent in the nature of the project. That is, the reason all my side projects tended to be single-use and single-launch was because they were designed for that. I was lying to myself. The truth was, my side projects never took off because they were missing the most important fuel a project needs: time. I would…

It’s fun to hate on things we love. Humans tend to have a sort of fetish for violence when things are too easy. Utopia will never exist because Marco Arment won’t like a minor detail, and will ruin it for everyone. I love and respect Marco, and use his name only as the most common example of behavior that, when inspected, really doesn’t seem to be in our favor. I get frustrated by usability bugs as much as anyone. And as someone who like Marco runs a company, I understand what it feels like when someone criticizes your product. It is by far one of the worst feelings of this strange…

Why React Native is the Future I have a weird way of describing software. And you’ll either know what I mean, or you won’t. It’s sort of strange, but software interfaces feel like they have a weight. When I use an interface, it can feel heavy, or it can feel light. Neither is better than the other. It just sort of depends. Chrome is very light. Safari feels heavier. And Firefox feels the heaviest. It’s probably bullshit, but that’s the feeling I get. One of the heaviest feeling experiences in my software development career has been using Swift in Xcode. Oh the pain. The delay. The…

To whom it may concern, I’ve always wanted to start a letter like that. During the 90s, my dad owned a fast-food restaurant in what was then not-River North. I remember he would receive letters addressed like that. Thus began my mild infatuation with TWIMC. Last night I attempted to continue reading Biocentrism, a book I’ve been spending some time with every night. I only ever read when I get into bed, for as long as I can keep my eyes open. Sometimes I’ll last twenty minutes. Other times, just a few. But yesterday, as I read a few sentences, I felt a strange resistance. It had happened…

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? I’ve always thought the answer to this was yes, of course it makes a sound, even when no one is present. I posted this question to Twitter and the answers were the same: of course it makes a sound! I was surprised to learn this is the wrong answer. After I heard the case for why it does not in fact make a sound, I was dumbfounded. Why had I been conditioned to see it otherwise? It was kind of earth-shattering. Let me explain why a falling tree only makes a sound when someone is present. “Sound” is made when our ears pick…

I’ve recently been entangled in the world of quantum physics, where absolutely nothing makes sense. I dance this confused ballad every so often, and always wind up at the same place: what on earth is going on here? The universe is as suspicious as ever. I’m reading a book called Biocentrism, which argues that without conscious observers, the universe quite simply does not exist. That is, the universe as we know does not exist “physically”, but we create it with our minds. How is this done? Well, I’m only a hobbyist, and quantum mechanics is still far above my pay-grade. But here’s my…

I hate marketing. There, I said it. I hate hate hate marketing. Reaching out to people, forming new “connections”, networking—I cannot stand even the thought of imagining myself at a tech conference. I hate the thought of approaching strangers and trying to somehow mention or convince them of me or my product. Apart from my wife and a few long-standing friends, I am notoriously bad at up-keeping relationships. Marketing for me is something I haven’t been able to learn like other things. If you want to learn to program, well, that’s easy: just follow the tutorials. If you want to learn to…

This is my attempted (re)beginning of writing three pages every day in the morning. It's a sort of therapy for me. A lot of stuff finds itself circulating in my mind, then lingers and pollutes it. It's become exhausting to think, I should write this down, and expand on it to learn more about it, then never following through. Writing three pages every day is something I learned from The Artist’s Way. At first I thought it would be impossible, that I couldn’t possibly find something to write about every single day. But several months ago, I did this same exercise and found that not only was it…

Sans opened his eyes, his face smothered with ash and dust. His ears were ringing painfully, his arms and legs bruised and paralyzed. Around him were bodies—dead—decapitated, amputated. The explosion had killed everyone but him. It was night out, and he could hear sirens in the distance. He tried moving, but could not summon it. Even if he could, there was nowhere for him to go—everything had collapsed around him, and there was no open path. He managed to free his arm from under the body of a woman—a woman that he would otherwise have found attractive. A wooden plank protruded through her…

A friend texted me today asking if I was busy. How to answer such a question? No, and it may be "I need help installing Word on my impossibly slow and unresponsive computer." Yes, and I'm an asshole. "No what's up?" Please don't be a tech issue. Please don't be a tech issue. "I feel lost. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't seem to be motivated by anything anymore. I don't know where my passion has gone." I double check the sender to make sure it wasn't me. Sigh, — how to help you dear friend when it is I that needs help? I've always had the luxury of giving up. That is,…

That's what gets left out. In stories about fame, success, and glory, we don't get a sense of time. We only learn of the checkpoints in someone's journey, events which may have numbered just a hundred in the story of one person. The meantime are all the long endless seconds in between. The meantime is eternity. It is time at a pace beyond your control. It is days that never end, constant doubt and questioning, incessant fear and irrational paranoia. It is chores and work and labor and illness and theft and hunger and life. The meantime is when it's easiest for us to give up. It is the time…