Category Archives: Personal
Scaling Back
One benefit that has come from my recent hiatus is that I no longer feel the pressure to check-in on my social networks and other various websites that I relied on for my daily (hourly) dose of RIGHT NOW. I’ve always kept my Twitter following count very low on purpose. As much as people tweet, […]
Unexcused Absence
I’ve been absent the last two months. When I laid it all out in the open last year, one of the worries I expressed was my fear of falling down again without realizing it. Depression is stealthy. Like a glacier. No matter how strong your defenses, you suddenly wake up one day to find it […]
2014 Business Yearly Review
Inspired by this article on doing a year-end review of your indie business, I took a few minutes and calculated some stats and compiled my major accomplishments from 2014. The result was eye-opening and made me feel more than a little bit proud. I’ve made a conscious effort to be more transparent about my business […]
Knowing When to Quit
I hate using the word “quit”. Because it’s not quitting. It’s not even “giving up”. Today, the prolific Manton Reece wrote a blog post announcing that he is sunsetting his Twitter apps. This, after a recent announcement that Twitter’s (amazing!) new fully searchable tweet archives won’t be made available to third-party developers. Twitter’s fully-searchable index […]
I Knew There Was Something Wrong With Me
It was when I raised my hand – my left one, never my right one – to answer a question in fifth grade that I knew there was something wrong with me. In that moment, what had simply been a matter of course turned into a conscious habit. I became aware for the first time […]
Constraints
I often find that constraints, real or artificial, can be a huge motivation and productivity boost when I find myself stalled on a project or piece of work. Forcing yourself to work within a specific limitation can cause you to find a creative solution in a direction you might otherwise never consider. In my own […]
Marching Through the Wilderness
(How could I not title this post after one of my favorite David Byrne songs?) Gus has a terrific post on his blog about what he calls “the wilderness” – a period of time between major software releases “where I’m pretty lost, and I don’t know what to do.” His working theory on the matter […]
Change Your Habits and Cheer Up
I’ve been feeling down the last couple of months. Dissatisfaction with work, the stress of a new baby, etc, etc. Nothing horrible – just a general feeling of depression that has lasted a bit longer than my up and down cycles typically do. A few weeks ago, once I was able to rationalize what I […]
The Thrill
Yesterday, Daniel Jalkut tweeted The only things better than shipping an app are the thankless months of hard work that go into making it halfway presentable. Yep, it’s fun. — Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) April 4, 2014 That’s an apt way of describing the strange mix of joy and awe programmers feel when, after hours, days, […]