geeko

SEEKING WORK, located in Stuttgart, Germany.

I develop and design iOS apps.

Email: [email protected] | twitter: @vpdn

I'm currently working as a freelance iOS dev in a scrum team on moovel[1]. I'll be available for remote contract work starting june.

Samples:

[1] moovel (dev): http://www.daimler.com/technology-and-innovation/mobility-co...

[2] Converter app (dev & design), roughly 700k downloads: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/converter/id423521445?mt=8

[3] Timetracking App (design): http://d.pr/i/zGZW

I hope the iPad will also turn into a music instrument. Something in the direction of the reactable [1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgy1S8qymx0

It's easy to dismiss things. It's much harder to try to imagine the possibilities and build things.

Reminds me of _why's quote:

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

" Watch how they have memorized all the shortcuts and quirks of their custom line-of-business apps. You'll discover a class of users who want power and control, not simplicity and ease-of-use."

Doesn't "quirks" already imply that it's non-optimal? Shouldn't we think of applications and user interfaces which don't make someone remembering all shortcuts a "professional"? As stated by others before, simplicity and ease of use aren't strongly correlated to power and control.

Are you still making 1$ off your site today?

Ok, seems like I'm the only one with googlelitis.

Worse if down the road, you find yourself not being able to build the stuff you'd like to build.

Finding a job is hard. Finding your passion is much harder.

What you're saying is similar to what I am trying to do:

Take up projects which are 60% stuff you know how to do and 40% things you'd like to learn (the numbers are just made up, but you get the point). Even better, get paid for learning (e.g. competition with prizes or learning in a corporate environment)

Totally agree on this. I'm on it at this very moment :)

And I'm telling you, even then, convincing managers is not easier than convincing any other investor.

In consulting, it's usually not your employer that pushes you. It's your clients. In a startup, it's either your investors or your customer (hopefully). Either way, there's always forces that want you to execute instead of learn. There's no direct visible gain from you learning. It's like climate change. It's important, but noone in power cares.

I totally agree with your long term statement. And I do also agree with you on the fact that just learning without execution renders your learning useless.

The thing is, how do you juggle between these two extremes? @imp notes below:

"I let my own ambitions determine which zone I'm in, and they last from a couple weeks to months."

The cycle seems to come naturally to him. For others like @Ixiaus it takes more conscious effort (I assume, since he quit his job to be able to learn the things which matter to him).

Are you doing anything to nurture these two extremes? Or do they just come naturally to you?

Your comment reminds me of a discussion I had with my cofounder long time ago (yes I have tried the startup path multiple times). We were discussing how this pattern of wildness, of strong desire to produce things follows an almost relaxing, reflecting period. The discussion arose while we were learning about the coding and refactoring cycle during the extreme programming days in Karlsruhe, Germany where I used to study.

@Ixiaus, are you on twitter? Would love to continue reading how you're doing. Your homepage link works as well of course.

Feel free to drop me an email (vp[at]dinhmail.de) when you're traveling to Germany. Beers on me :-)

It sounds easy to do so. Too often however, I find myself reading how-tos and copy-pasting tutorials while building stuff...and forgetting everything after I finished.

I have the feeling that google has significantly changed the way I store things in my head (for the better or worse). Instead of remembering how things are done and why so, I at best save a mental hyperlink to the information or worse, I just rely on google to be available and give me the tutorial/code snippet I need at that very moment (and again forgetting all afterwards).

Being forced to reproduce what you've learned at least once without having google is actually useful (at least for the way my brain works).

Here's haystack.com couple of years back: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://haystack.com

I wonder how much they paid for the domain?

"More than half of fliers report some level of anxiety before boarding a plane, and 5% of the population refuses to fly at all."

Where does this data come from?

...even if you only weight 80 pounds.

You might be interested in Tony's startup2startup talk: http://startup2startup.com/2009/03/27/tony-hsieh-zappos-in-t...

It might just be a mistake on apple's side. They have and will probably continue to revoke apps which have previously been accepted to the App Store.

I wonder how they measure happiness in those trials. Is there some kind of 'Happy Unit' metric to measure happiness?