My five year old, driving home from daycare today, unprompted: I know what lockdown is. Like when we had to stay home for a long time last year? It’s when we turn the lights off and lock the door and hide in the fire room because a bad guy is coming. Pause. But, daddy. Why… Continue reading
Personal
Time Machine
We opened the door and stepped out of our time machine — my children another year older.
Continue readingTextBuddy is a Mac|Life Editor’s Choice
If you don’t mind, I’d like to interrupt my not-so-regularly-scheduled posts about silly macOS workflows and tech complaining for a not-so-humble-brag.
TextBuddy received a lovely review in the June issue of Mac|Life – including an Editor’s Choice seal of approval.
“The bottom line. A marvel. If you work with text, you need this app.”
As a nerdy kid who grew up in the 90s browsing the magazine section of Waldenbooks for the latest issues of Macworld, boot, and Next Generation, seeing one of my apps in a print magazine is a huge thrill.
Continue readingAn Email Followup About Standing Desks and Ultrawide Monitors
An online friend emailed me after reading my previous standing desk post with a few questions about the monitor pictured on my office desk.
My reply kept getting longer and longer (go figure) until I decided I might as well publish it here in case anyone else finds it interesting. Without further ado, here’s another 869 words about ultrawide and multiple monitor setups.
Continue readingOw, My Back
We officially went into quarantine on March 22. One hot afternoon in June, I found myself in the garage with a pair of shears, a screwdriver, and a hammer so I could cut an inch of leather off my belt and punch a new hole.
All in all, I had lost twenty pounds by doing nothing.
But did I feel better? Not at all. By May, I was hurting. The next month I was in pain. That summer was nothing but agony from muscle and skeletal pain.
This post is all the fun, nerdy details that went into making my home and work offices more comfortable. It was a bit of self-preservation mixed with stress-shopping. But if you want the TL;DR, I can sum it up with two words:
Stop. Sitting.
Continue readingMotivation
A few years ago, my therapist told me I’m going to have just the right personality and temperament to enjoy my 40s when I get there. I wasn’t entirely sure how to take his comment then, but now that I’m well into my thirty-eighth trip around the Sun, I think it’s beginning to sink in.
Continue readingFive
I don’t quite understand how it’s been five years already. Nevertheless, happy birthday to the most fearless and persistent young lady I’ve ever known.
Solving Problems on Systematic
If you need something to listen to this weekend or during your next commute, here’s a link to me prattling on for forty-six minutes about how and why I build the software I do.
Brett Terpstra was kind enough to invite me on as the guest of his Systematic podcast this week. And when he says I’m “on about the same level of geek frequency as” he is, well, that’s a heck of a compliment in my book.
Continue readingDigital Heirlooms
If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you’ll find that I take preserving our (my family’s) digital memories and history seriously.
However, if I were to die tomorrow, the app I made for my son and installed on his iPad this morning will stop working in one-hundred and ninety-two days. Not for any technical reason. Not because of future software incompatibilities. If his iPad remained in working order for another hundred years, it wouldn’t even matter. This digital heirloom will self-destruct as soon as my developer certificate expires.
And it’s all due to an arbitrary decision on Apple’s part.
I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that future historians and even archaeologists are going to revisit our time and be furious at the direction our industry turned towards using consolidation, monopoly power, and artificial restrictions to protect profits at all costs.
Continue readingDon’t Let Experience Get in Your Way
A coworker and I have been working crazy hours since March on a huge new product feature – him on Android and myself on iOS. Quite frankly, it’s maybe the best work we’ve done in our careers. And work I, at least, wasn’t sure we were even skilled enough to pull off. When we first pitched it to the client, we asked for eight weeks of uninterrupted dev time to build an MVP. They gave us five.
If he and I had predicted these challenges upfront, I’m not sure if we would have pitched the work at all. But we missed them. And now I think that’s a good thing. Because, unfinished loose ends or not, we now find ourselves mere weeks from shipping the best work we’ve ever done.
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