New and Improved .Me

I was working on benford.name today and realized I don’t enjoy working on the web that much.  Creating things on iOS is much more fulfilling and I’d rather spend my spare cycles making cool apps.

So I took the plunge and am doing what I wanted to do 3 months ago.

I’m using my benford.me domain and I’ll redirect benford.name over when this site is finished.

Moving to squarespace presents a few challenges.  Benford.name was hosted on webfaction.com (they are an awesome host by the way) and I also hosted a few trac sites and subversion repositories with them.  Github to the rescue!  Not only is Git a much happier SCM than Subversion, but Github has bug tracking, wiki, and other cool features.

I’m a bit unnerved about this but it helps to know that all decisions are temporary, you just make them and move on.  

Coping with change

How much of our hypercritical knee jerk reactions to change is not about the changes and more about our unwillingness to accept progress.

Relearning UI is frusterating and annoying, but it is a temporary problem.  When XCode 4 was launched last summer, the transition away from XCode 3 was horribly difficult.  But 6 months later I’ve forgotten that XCode 3 even existed.

Change is hard, but change is good too.  Embrace it baby!

I will miss you Steve

The iPhone inspired me to quit my job and make apps for a living. Steve’s vision made that possible and he effected my life in a big way.

I didn’t know you, but I sure will miss you.

Thanks Steve Jobs!

To django or not to django

Wordpress is great! Tumbler is pretty neat too. I’d even use blogger if I had to. But I decided to write my own blog engine in django. It gives me an excuse to use python, and it also keeps my toe in the web programming world. And I love having ultimate control over my site.

It’s not all roses though. My site is pretty ugly and the blog has no features. I really thought long and hard about dumping my entire site and going with something fancy like squarespace or a nice hosted wordpress blog. I even tried them out and was duly impressed. Squarespace was so great I signed up and started converting things over. But alas, I cancelled that idea in the end.

Keeping my django blog seems like a silly decision. I have no time to play around with a web framework I only partially know. But I can’t give up on the things I want to be good at. I love the web and although hand typing HTML makes me feel sick inside, it’s something I will never give up.

Django really hits home with me. It’s powerful, written in python, and the built-in admin panel is the cat’s meow. Building my own blog engine keeps my web skills alive. The more I focus on non web projects, the less I remember about my good pal the web.

It’s about the journey not the destination. So I’ll continue poking along with my half-assed blog engine. And I am going to start blogging again, so things may improve a bit around here.

Picking your core competency

About a year ago I set a firm goal that I wanted to create an iphone game.  But I wanted to design and create a game worthy of being featured on Apple’s AppStore.  

Joel Spolsky wrote a great blog post back in 2001, and he said:  “If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.” So this meant I’m going to need to take on some form of visual design.

I started with the fundamentals.  Learning the tools was the easy part.  But getting results I was happy with has been insanely difficult.  It hasn’t been impossible though, and I’ve finally reached a phase I can start creating passable game art.

My core competency had to grow to fit my entrepreneurial goals.  

This focused attention on growing new skills forced me to lose old skills .  It’s hard to admit to yourself that you can’t do everything, but it’s a sure a relief when you let go of things that are holding you back.

I’ve slowly been abandoning web development and focusing on iOS development and visual design.