“Doodle Space Fighter” Since so many of my classmates have free time until they start their jobs, I thought I’d give myself the chance to spend some time doing something I’ve wanted to do for the last 3 years: write a video game. This is an actual screenshot of the game running on my iPhone right now. It’s been in dev for about 2 weeks (although I’ve been learning how to code games for the past ~3 months) and it’s been the most fun I’ve had coding/designing in a long time. The idea will be that your ship is a fighter escorting a delivery freighter through the “doodle space zone”. Every delivery will take longer than the last and become more treacherous. You earn money with each delivery (naturally) which you can spend to upgrade your ship’s defenses/offenses. All the doodles are currently drawn by me although if you want some of your art work in the game, feel free to drop me a line! I’ll update as I progress through the game development! I’ll need testers soon too…
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“Doodle Space Fighter”

Since so many of my classmates have free time until they start their jobs, I thought I’d give myself the chance to spend some time doing something I’ve wanted to do for the last 3 years: write a video game.

This is an actual screenshot of the game running on my iPhone right now. It’s been in dev for about 2 weeks (although I’ve been learning how to code games for the past ~3 months) and it’s been the most fun I’ve had coding/designing in a long time.

The idea will be that your ship is a fighter escorting a delivery freighter through the “doodle space zone”. Every delivery will take longer than the last and become more treacherous. You earn money with each delivery (naturally) which you can spend to upgrade your ship’s defenses/offenses.

All the doodles are currently drawn by me although if you want some of your art work in the game, feel free to drop me a line!

I’ll update as I progress through the game development! I’ll need testers soon too…

Ideas are fragile—please don’t crush them.

This past year, I was an officer in the entrepreneurship club at SMU, which centered around a business plan competition and forming teams around ideas.

The one thing that we stressed to every new club member there was to not crush an idea too early. There are a million reasons why an idea won’t work or why a business will fail. When you’re generating ideas though, you’re starting down pathways that you can’t see the end of. Just like a seed eventually becomes a flower, an idea eventually can become a successful business.

The worst and most annoying thing that happens though is when someone pitches an idea and you immediately hear: “no that won’t work because…” or “that’s already been done before”. That’s it—that seed is killed and it’ll never grow into anything more interesting. 

Please, the next time you hear an idea, resist the urge to point out all the flaws of the idea. Instead, encourage it—you never know where it’ll lead. The initial idea might grow into something completely different and it might be viable by the end of the discussion. 

I can’t stress this enough: Do what you love…in between work commitments, and family commitments, and commitments that tend to pop up and take immediate precedence over doing the thing you love. Because the bottom line is that life is short, and you owe it to yourself to spend the majority of it giving yourself wholly and completely to something you absolutely hate, and 20 minutes here and there doing what you feel you were put on this earth to do.
The Onion: Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

Turning off all those pings, beeps, buzzes and chimes

When I first watched The Social Network, I was introduced to the concept of being ‘wired in’ for the first time. Being a coder/app designer for the last five years, I admittedly felt ashamed that this was the first I had ever seen this concept—that when you’re coding, you really should just keep coding and not be disturbed.

Ever since then, I had worked to adopt this into my workflow but I always resisted. I felt that I could at least still get text messages or at least still watch a tv show in the background. It wasn’t until after reading even more blogs of creative people/coders that I finally decided to truly wire myself in when I work—large headphones on playing music that I can stay focused to.

The first time I got to really experience just how amazing this is was at the Hackathon I attended just a week or two ago. Everyone around me was working, which was helpful, and so I just plugged in my headphones and hacked away for hours. In about ~6 hours time, I had honestly completed what would normally take me 12-20 hours to do. I had zero interruptions, since I wasn’t chatting with anyone and I wasn’t checking my phone or the Messages app on my Mac. 

After that, it got easier and easier to turn off all the notifications. My phone now only dings on VIP mail where as before it would ding on any email. My computer’s dock has almost all the red notification indicators off. I’ve turned off previews of messages, so that the animation in the top right doesn’t swing in and distract my attention.

I can’t recommend this enough—my productivity has skyrocketed. I no longer get sucked into a conversation, or temporarily pulled away from a train of thought, or lose something I was just starting to figure out.

One of my favorite descriptions of coding was someone who said it was like building a mental house of cards. You’re managing so many aspects of a very delicate structure and the slightest disruption or bump will make the whole thing tumble. 

So if you do any kind of work where you need to stay focused, or if you do any kind of creation based activity, do yourself a favor: disconnect for a few hours. The world will still be there when you come back to it!

loganabbott:

What Most Schools Don’t Teach - Code.org

“Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” - Steve Jobs

Love this. Coding is so much more than typing into a computer. It’s a way to create. And it’s a way to share that creation with millions of people with the click of a button. 

I wouldn’t trade what I do for anything in the world.

TEDActive Hackathon

Yesterday I spent the day at SMU’s first ‘hackathon’, which was great fun. I had the priviledge of doing a lightning talk at the beginning (on the topic app development & design), and then was around during the day to just be of any help.

There were 5 teams formed with 6 hours to put together some kind of mobile app that solves a problem on our campus. Since it was a pretty short hackathon, people were judged more on ideas / mockups / feasability more so than anything they actually hacked together.

I ended up spending the day wired into my laptop working on my company’s new app, which should ship within the month—of course by saying it’s going to ship within the month, I’ve probably just doomed myself to shipping it in 6, but I’m optimistic nonetheless.

Day Two of my workathon

It’s day two of working on all my apps, plus hopefully starting a new mini hobby app.

What’s been done so far:

  • Updated Compositions for Mac and sent it in to Apple for review.
  • Updated TimeTag for Mac and sent it in to Apple for review.

What I’m working on tonight:

So far I’ve completely gutted Compositions for iOS. I pulled out all the old syncing logic, pulled out the old Dropbox SDK, and am starting over from scratch using the new Dropbox Sync API. So far I like it, but since it’s a few days old, there’s not much documentation on it. So I’m trying to figure it out from the little example app they gave me.

Once I’m done with the syncing logic, I’ll be adding in the ability to edit .txt files to the iOS version as well. Then most likely I’m going to make the app free, and make a huge push for it in the internets. 

The big opportunity here by making it free is throwing in an IAP (in-app purchase) that lets people take snapshots using simple .txt documents. The idea is that the database (which I plan to store online, probably using Parse or StackMob) will keep track of all the versions of the file. I also want to add in an added bonus of chapters, so that a single file can be segmented into various chapters, and the server will manage all the metadata for the user behind the scenes.

I’ll update as I keep working! 

Business plans and business realities…

My company is currently at a crossroads. We’re nearing the release of our first product (Notes), which means a few things:

  1. We’re about to start getting revenue (hopefully!)
  2. We’re about to start raising our round one investment (again..hopefully!)
  3. We’re nearly out of our seed money

Looking at #2 and #3, I am starting to work on our business plan again to send out to a new round of investors. What’s been fun is going through our original plan (the one we used to raise the seed money) and seeing where we planned to be by now…and the reality of where we actually are.

Like most things in life, we are well behind schedule. But as a result, we’ve really produced something that I’m really proud of. The attention to detail in this app is unlike any that I’ve worked on before. I really hope that shows when we release it in the coming weeks.

The other thing is that we spent so much less in these first few months than I anticipated. We originally wanted to raise more than we actually did so we had to cut down on a ton of expenditures—we either just cut it out entirely or we figured out a way to do it way cheaper.

That’s kind of the curse and blessing of a lot of money. The blessing is that you can do way more with it. The curse is that you do way more with it—you’re far less critical of spending money when you feel like you have a lot to spend. It’s similar to how I felt playing poker a few weeks back, in New Orleans. I started off with a little amount of money and played very cautiously—I took sure bets mostly. Then with the stack of chips piling higher and higher, I started playing much more loosely. The result? I blew through my lead as well as my original amount and walked away with nothing.

So that’s kind of the lesson I’ve learned these past few months. You gotta slow play your money, no matter how much you raise. It’s way better to spend only when you really need to and to figure out a way to save when you can. As a result, we’ve kept our developer onboard much longer than originally planned (who is a true asset) and cut back on things where we didn’t need to spend (like monthly travel costs to have meetings in a physical location).

In either case, I’m so eager to actually start selling something, even if it falls flat on its face. It’ll be good to figure out if we have something people want or not, and if not, to find out how we can change to adapt to what they do want. I keep reminding myself that many companies nearly failed time and time again until they found that one magical moment where they just took off…So if it’s not this time, I’ll work some more and hope it’s the next!

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