Archive for the 'Advice' Category

Cockiness of Programmers

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013

There’s no doubt that programmers are lazy people.  Anything that can be automated is, copy/paste code – you got it! There is another trait of programmers that they assume because they can program in one language well, and have touched a few other languages over the years they can quickly learn a new language on [...]

ABT: Always Be Testing

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Sales teams often have the letters ABC plastered somewhere next to their weekly leader boards and top salesman photo. It stands for Always Be Closing and it’s a motto that keeps sales people laser focused on their goals. Marketing teams should have a similar motto: ABT – Always be testing. Lately I’ve had the opportunity [...]

Doing Hard Work

Monday, October 1st, 2012

There are several hard problems in computer science that seem to be getting solved in a real way. Google’s Driverless cars are perhaps the most recent example of computers taking on a challenge assumed by many to be impossible just a few years ago. And they’re doing a good job. In 2015 they will have [...]

Using tmux and Vim

Monday, August 27th, 2012

Working on the same projects from multiple computers can be difficult.  There are lots of solutions for this problem such as using Dropbox to sync files between computers. but that leaves your workspace to start from scratch ie when working from the office last I had these 10 files open, and a couple of things [...]

Start with Twitter Bootstrap

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

I was playing around with Twitter Bootstrap yesterday and managed to very easily migrate my App Control website over to use it as a way to clean up the UI and get it looking a little more consistent. It provides some nice looking default looks and easy to use css classes to apply. It’s hard [...]

Hypothesis on Good Game Design

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

A good game is something that is not trivial to create. There are a lot of skills that go into creating a good game, from the artwork to the sound, and programming. They all work together to hopefully create something that is compelling enough for people to enjoy and spend time with. This last point [...]

Outsourcing work

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Lack of time has become my biggest issue. A full work day followed by working on several other projects at once including (currently) two iOS games, two web apps, a couple of blogs, an entry for the MintChip Challenge, starting a garden, and training for a half-marathon. It’s no surprise that I have little time [...]

Fabric For Development

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Fabric is a pretty awesome tool for deploying projects. But it turns out that it’s also pretty awesome for lots of other stuff. At PyCon 2012 there was a talk given by Ricardo Kirkner (which you can watch here) that inspired me to play around with fabric in some new ways. It’s possible to use [...]

Dealing with iOS App Rejections

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Over the past few months I have released a number of apps to the Apple iTunes Store.  It’s been interesting to go though the submitting process so often and YES I have had some apps be rejected. In most cases rejections are legitimate omissions on my part.  Missing a support link, not setting up game center correctly [...]

Updating iPhone Apps Without Submitting Again

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Having developed a few iPhone/iPad apps now there has been a few things that have tripped me up and created more work than necessary. One of those is that small bugs in the program such as a bad link, misspelled words or game play tweaks like speeds and frequencies that you want to change after [...]