The Art of Shipping

The Quitting Zone

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 14:01:43 -0400

Face it. If your working on a large side project that you hope to be profitable, you’re going to run into moments when you can’t stand the stench of anything related to your project. You’ve run into a whale of a problem and there’s no tiptoe’ing around it.

If you’re a human being like me, this usually leads to a lot of abandoned, half-baked projects. They could have been profitable, but your subconscious convinced you that “there was no way that you could get over that [insert random hurdle here], so why even bother continuing?

Quitting is the only decision that your mind can rationally justify. Hell, a week later, you’ll feel much better about the fact that you just tossed another project into the metaphorical gutter of unfinished work.

Clearly, your mind has forgotten, or simply doesn’t care about all the rationalizations you’ve made why starting this project would be worth it in the first place. You have entered the Quitting zone. You’ve been here before and you will be here again.

There is only one rule about getting passed the Quitting Zone: Do not under any circumstances listen to yourself. You feel overwhelmed, paralyzed, unable to continue, and ready to submit to the quitting gods.

Go do something else for a few days, and really think about your problem. It’s NOT AS BAD AS IT SEEMS. Talk to some other people, the solution might even be you need to seek other people interested in working with you.

No emotions last forever. The feeling will disappear and you’ll be all happy again ( Science! ). This is when you get back to work.

You didn’t start your product to “build skills”, you started in hopes of building a profitable product. Shipping is a skillset in itself, and mastering the Quitting Zone is a whopping part of it.

Twitter me up.

Work Around What You Suck At

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 11:37:58 -0400

My game-in-progress requires a clever character design: A few characters are the main part of the game and I’d rather they didn’t look like the work of a toddler. I can handle some design, but I had never tried building characters. Yesterday I gave it a shot.

No single iteration of the details was anything I was looking for. I grew stressed and ready to quit. How can I build a great game if I don’t have one of the most important skills needed?

Easy. Work and perfect the things I CAN do well. My game has plenty of programming, writing, and interface design — all of which I know I can do well. Character Design is frustrating, but I can learn or find other who’d love to trick out some sweet personalities.

Conclusion: Working on things you suck at is not a good idea if you value your motivation and stress levels. Learn as much as you can about them and wait to do them last unless you absolutely can’t.

Create Side Products, not Side Projects

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 12:58:00 -0400

When I hear “Project” from someone, that means to me that you’re building something that will help you fill out your resume and skillset. Usually projects aren’t meant to be monetized, and often times my assumptions are correct.

I’m not a fan of working on side projects for the sole reason of increasing your intrinsic value for potential employers or clients. Hear me out.

I am not one of those people, but the mindset isn’t hard to understand: working on side projects increases your skills at your craft, therefore you are increasing your monetary value to those who are in need of your abilities.

Certainly a respectable pursuit, but I think you should work on products instead of projects. Products are a better investment of your time, and you should understand why:

Products offer a possible return on investment. A lot of time is put into projects, and while the time isn’t worthless, it could be better valued as a product. It’s possible you won’t make a cent, but without shipping a product you’re not even giving yourself a shot.

Products will teach you other useful skills you’d never learn with a project. Marketing, programming, design, even music can all be valuable parts of launching a good product. Maybe you don’t have the time to learn the extra skills. That’s fine because:

Products can teach you to network with other talented producers. You certainly don’t have to do everything on your own, and you shouldn’t be surprised that their are plenty of others who are looking for great people to make products with.

Make sure you find someone you have chemistry with though. Working with bad partners will become a nightmare fast.

There are plenty of places to meet other producers online like builditwith.me , meetup.com, cofounder2be.com and even reddit or hacker news if you’re patient enough.

What if you are the employee type? You have no interest in your own product and you just want to work for someone else’s large company. That’s fine, but my point stands because:

Understanding the entire production cycle of a product will make you a better employee. Even if I’m simply programming, I’ve taught myself to understand how my programming is going to affect all other aspects of the product. If I take everything into consideration, it makes designing and marketing around it much more fluid.

Personally I’d rather work on my own product than other people’s products, and you probably do, too. Your chances of doing this are much more likely if you turn every side project into a product.

Start at the Core

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 15:38:25 -0400

Last week I wrote a piece about what I thought would be an excellent plan to keep my motivation high for working on personal projects.

I messed up a bit.

Staying orthogonal, gettings others involved, and especially not overworking myself remain to be solid words of advice from my past self. What I want to reevaluate is breaking my project up into many mini projects.

I wouldn’t say that it was a bad idea, but I don’t think I was specific enough. Breaking your project down is the what, but after a week of trial I realize I need to focus on the how.

My current project is a iOS game I’m calling Mini Margin. Think Storage Wars with a few adjustments. Certainly a game that a focused, motivated individual should be able to pull off.

My first mini project was to create all the needed Views and build each transitions (segues) between each screen. I quickly became bored of this so I broke my mini project rule and started designing, a project I wasn’t supposed to indulge for awhile. This bored me quickly, too.

Motivation was waning. I had to change the way I was approaching my project.

If you’ve watched Storage Wars, you’d know that the primary events of the show are the bidding and the haggling. Without these two primary components, the drama and the delight I get from seeing how well each character faired afterwards are nonexistent.

I should have started the project building the algorithms needed for bidding and haggling. If these two algorithms themselves work very well, the game could be fun even with a shit design. They are the two most important cogs in the wheel.

Motivation has been abundant since I switched to building these algorithms. I’ll have a great foundation for building the rest of my game once these two algorithms are complete, and I’m very excited to keep working.

I’m not into saying that it will work for everyone, but if your a product guy like me, who designs and develops most of all his projects, consider starting with the hard parts, because most likely those are the biggest selling points of your product.

Staying Engaged in a Large Project

Thu, 31 May 2012 18:35:42 -0400

I’ve found giving up on my projects to be really easy, or at least hard to not do. I’m about to start another ‘big’ one and I have some thoughts about how I can maintain focus that you may find useful.

Not staying orthogonal has really made any big project a nightmare. Once your codebase is massive, small changes can have big, annoying consequences if you do not keep each system independent from others. Apple tries it’s hard to inject the idea of a Model-View controller into your head, and I get the point.

The human mind loves being rewarded and I’ve previously done a poor job of giving myself little rewards as I continually progress through my project. My last project I spread my attention and never focused on finishing a single part of it — I got zero reward from actually finishing even one screen from the game.

Not getting any validation or feeling of rewards sucked, but I also worked with people I did not enjoy working with. Be picky about partnerships with others, you might find yourself wasting a massive amount of time working with people you have little chemistry with.

I hate stressful, failed projects (duh), so I’ve really been thinking about how I can follow through with the next one. Here’s some of my hypothesis:

Separate the project into several mini projects. There are a lot of challenges ahead, so I’ve broken them down into related areas and plan on tackling them one by one. I want to keep my head focused on the mini project itself, so my mind isn’t caught dwelling on the size of the large project. This also forces me to be orthogonal. One project at the end will be dedicated to polishing and connecting all the elements together.

I’m not going to overwork myself. I’ve tried the 10 hour a day, everyday approach, and I felt like this cramped my creativity and turned me more into a obsessive, unproductive nervous wreck. I’m keeping my hours limited and I’m not going to shy away from other hobbies.

I’m not going to be shy about getting others involved. Don’t hide your project if you want to finish it. I know the fear of rejection is powerful but if you don’t get it out there then you aren’t getting any ideas from other amazingly creative people. Now that being said:

I’m not going to let just anyone work on the project just because they want to. I’ve seen plenty of people, including myself, throw themselves onto a team, making assumptions that everyone is driven, dedicated, fun and creative as you only to be severely disappointed.

I’m certainly not going to turn away everyone, but instead of approaching people to jump into a project, why not just ask to chat with them, get to know them a bit, discuss random topics, then see how you like em and go with it then?

These are my hypothesis. I start my project tomorrow, it’s a iOS game and I will share neat things I learn and make along the way.

Hit me up on twitter.

How Ambition may be hurting you

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:57:20 -0400

Ambition changed my life over a year ago. I wanted to do great things — things that would change my life and those dear to me. No longer would playing video games every night satisfy me.

Ambition, even in a year’s time, has led to many great things. The amount I have learned in this short period of time puts any other equal interval of my life to shame — I’ve become a decent programmer, designer and app producer and I still work every day to learn more.

My ambition, however, was untamed, and it came with many nasty side effects. I wanted to succeed badly. Success, I have learned, does not equal working 80 hours per week among other things.

Twice I ended up hating what I was working on because of blind ambition to make it work — I did not take time to think about the repercussions of pouring all of my life into a project. I now have a few rules that I use to control my ambition, so that I can not only remain productive, but still love every second of what I do (well, almost every second).

First rule: Limit the time you spend each week on your work. While it seems pouring every hour of your day is a great way to get ahead, your ultimately only beating yourself. Your creativity will suffer, you will burn out, and you will begin to hate what you do.

Your leisure time will start to accumulate which leads us to the second rule — find some other things to enjoy. It may be surprising how much other fun activities you can still enjoy while still getting a lot of work done. My productivity has skyrocketed since I started spreading my interests. My love for the work stays high and I end up getting much more done in 6 hours than I used to in 10.

Ambition tends to make us feel more important. Your putting long hours into a game-changing project, you feel serious, you talk serious, and your percieved as.. boring.

Final rule: Stop taking yourself so damn seriously. Stop pretending that you are in this to take over the world. You are not changing but a minor fraction of the Earth’s population and you are only going to change a minor fraction of how they spend their time at most.

Seriously, you are scaring people. Cut it out.

You are much better off trying to be real. I’m sure you hate 90% of the people on there who appear to either be spambots or soulless marketers on Twitter. You want to build connections? Enjoy your time, try to speak your mind, and follow those who interest you.

I’m not out to change the world — I build products because I have one hell of a time doing it. I blog not because I want to hit the front page of Reddit or Hacker News, but because maybe, just maybe, someone like me will see this and I will build a great relationship with like-minded people.

Ambition is great when its tamed. Come clean with yourself, your ambition needs a harness because untamed ambition won’t make you happy.

Shot of the app (my first) that I’m working on. What do...

Wed, 02 May 2012 21:13:14 -0400

Shot of the app (my first) that I’m working on. What do you think? I’m both designing and developing it =D.

Why I don't care for College as a Programmer

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:34:50 -0400

A minor disclaimer: I do not attend a bigshot university. I speak from my own experience at colleges that are ‘just okay’ schools. However, I’m inclined to believe that what I believe holds true to 99%, if not all colleges.

Most people hate college because of the work. Not enough partying and chillin with homies, yo. ”College would be great without the actual work”. If the work itself doesn’t bother you, you may very much thrive and enjoy the college atmosphere.

Or you may be like me.

I actually love to work hard. The idea of working, in itself, is not intimidating. What does bother me is what I am working on, how I am taught it, what I am not learning, and how much I am paying.

There are, of course, many different specific areas of programming that one may choose to pursue. I have made my decision as a mobile developer, and I work hard every day to become a better one.

I don’t care what specialization you choose, no school will have the ability to teach you exactly what learning will be useful to you. My school tries to be all encompassing— so broad that it teaches you the very basics of generalized programming.

This not only doesn’t work well, it’s a complete waste of my time. I’ve wasted countless hours in class ‘learning’ things that I may never have to use again in my life.

By trying to teach me as generally as possible, you teach me as little as possible.

My second complaint is the severe disconnect between what you learn and what is actually relevant. I’ve been to two colleges and have found them teaching me things that haven’t been relevant for years.

Even if your school manages to keep up with the times, there will always be some minor lag. The programming world moves fast — new frameworks are coming out often and things are always moving forward — it’s really difficult to keep up with this when courses are taught in huge semester chunks.

I also really dislike how knowledge of a subject is strongly reliant on the competency of the teacher. Even if I have a lovely, hilarious teacher, he may not be teaching me what you really need to be learning.

The generalized nonsense that I am suppose to be learning is now more difficult because of unreliable teachers.

Yes, there are some really effective teachers. But that is not the point.

The point is that I am taking on debt for a institution that has easily been replaced by the internet. I have taught myself to be a pretty good programmer almost entirely through what the internet offers me.

StackOverflow helps me solve simple problems. #Iphonedev IRC at freenode helps with with the tougher ones. Amazon connects me easily with books containing more specific knowledge on detailed subjects.

I can learn just about anything I want, and I certainly don’t need school to help.