My Top 5 factors for iOS Contracting Success

About a year ago now, I was contemplating leaving my day job and becoming an indie* iOS developer. My last day working in a cube farm was June 30th, 2011. Now, as I pack to leave for WWDC in the morning, it occurs to me how much my life has changed since I made that decision.

When examining my finances in preparation for this trip, I determined that in my first year as an indie I’ve made within $1000 of the amount of money I made in salary my last year as an employee, while spending more time with my family and enjoying my work so much more. Personally, I consider that to be a success.

Looking back, I can think of 5 things that I did that I think contributed most to that success, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share them with you all.

Mobile Apps - Boom or Bust? Sherman, please set the Wayback Machine for 1994, and then 1853

In the last few days, I’ve seen reports that Mobile Apps are repeating the 1996 expansion, and reports that Mobile Apps don’t provide a viable business model. I think that there are elements of truth in both articles, but I don’t think either is an adequate depiction of what I’m seeing. Let me see if I can explain. Like others, I feel like I’ve been here before, but for me the year wasn’t 1996, but 1994.

Musings On Stress

This weekend I have a ton of work I need to do. One evening earlier this week, I squished a bug that had been bothering me for a while in KidChart, one of my shipping apps. Instead of submitting a new version with just that one bug fix, I want to get one full work-flow session under UI Automation testing to see if there are any other bugs I should be fixing as well.

The decade of the developer?

This article claims that we’re entering the decade of the developer. I don’t know if that’s going to be true, but I’ve said before that changes to our industry, especially cloud computing, is making systems knowledge and Enterprise I.T. skills irrelevant. During the boom in the early 2001, I knew people here in Austin, Texas that were making $100K/year and up without a college education and with no formal training - because they had manage to acquire IT skills, experience, and had negotiated well for salaries in the past.

On Becoming an Interruptable Programmer

Just read a great blog post on becoming an interruptible programmer. Since the older my daughter gets the more interruptions I get from her, I think I’m going to try this and see how it goes.(Via @GeorgeSealy)

Cloud Computing: The Making of the Next Dinosaurs

Most of the most practical programmers I know, have something in common - they’ve all worked in places, usually small shops or small University departments, where they’ve been responsible for both the software they were writing and the computers that software ran on. Those people are more able to figure out what the real problems are, they don’t throw their hands up and say “must be a system problem”. They actually build things that work, and they can fix things that break.