Apps That I’d Like to Write but Won’t

Posted on August 15, 2011 by David

Like many people in my field, I have the dream of one day starting my own company and making a fortune from it. That’s not happening just yet, but I have no shortage of ideas for when I do!

Citizen-Powered Real-Time Transit Schedules

Basically foursquare for buses, you’d ‘check in’ when you got on a bus and that data would be used to adjust the timetable for anyone further down the route. This is mainly useful where real-time transit data is not available through official channels (e.g. Ottawa).

Seating Advice for Long Trips

You enter the trip you’re taking (train, plane, coach etc.) and the app figures out which side of the vehicle you should sit to get shade and/or see points of interest. Traveling from Ottawa to Toronto on the train? Sit on the left side so that you’ll get a view of Lake Ontario on the way by. Things like that.

D&D Counter Generator

Around the time I wrote this post I was seriously considering creating a Dungeons and Dragons token generator that would allow you to make your own monster counters based on the designs I did and then download them as a pdf. The money-making part of this idea is that you’d be able to order nicely printed versions on pre-perforated card that would last longer and be generally higher quality.

Productive or Responsive: Pick One

Posted on August 8, 2011 by David

When people ask me what I do at my job, I often have a hard time explaining. ‘Developer Advocate’ isn’t exactly specific in the same way that ‘Software Engineer’, ‘Visual Designer’ or ‘Phone Support’ is. Truth be told, I’m not 100% sure what the true scope of my job is: It changes daily. I do app reviews, tech support, community management, and write blog posts. Sometimes I even write code.

Responsive

A lot of my time is spent reading, researching, and responding to emails that I get from merchants and developers. People tend to get annoyed when you don’t respond to them, so I feel a certain responsibility to reply as soon as I can. Unfortunately this is often a black hole and if I’m not careful I can spend whole days doing it which would be great, except that support is only one of my many responsibilities.

Productive

Another thing I sink time into is development. Right now I’m working on a tool for feeding merchant ideas to developers, and it’s a lot of fun. I really enjoy sitting down, getting stuck into the code and finishing the day with a new feature. Unfortunately when I do this my inbox inevitably fills up and I feel guilty about not tending to it.

Pick One

So that’s my dilemma: At any one time I can either be on top of my emails (responsive) or get ahead on my development (productive). Right now my strategy is to tackle my email in the morning, then switch to development after lunch regardless of whether I’m ‘done’ or not (I’m beginning to suspect you can never be ‘done’ with email). This leaves me with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day which I quite enjoy, but does result in a mountain of mail in the morning which is somewhat less fun.

Life Dial Updated

Posted on August 6, 2011 by David

I just released an update for Life Dial on the Android Market. This version has a background gradient and fixes a bug where the dial would overlap the other text on devices with HVGA resolutions.

Life Dial on the Android Market

The Flying Developer Gets Some Dodgy Solicitation

Posted on August 1, 2011 by David

The other day I got a letter from the ‘Domain Registry of Canada’, telling me that one of my domains was expiring soon, along with a handy renewal form for me to fill out.

There are several problems with this.

First and foremost, I’m not a customer of the ‘Domain Registry of Canada’. Despite appearances, they’re not an official body either. What they’ve done is scraped my info from the whois data and generated this solicitation letter. Once you take the time to actually read the thing this becomes apparent, but I have a huge problem with the fact that they’ve dressed it up as an official document. I’ve uploaded a copy below so you can see for yourself.

Oh, and their prices SUCK.

Street Fighter Blind Boxes

Posted on July 30, 2011 by David

Street Fighter 4 has some new blind boxes, so as a direct result I now own two. Guile (on the right) doesn’t stand up too well, so he’s on his head.

The Flying Developer is Going to Vancouver

Posted on July 25, 2011 by David

Are there any Vancouver hackers reading this? If so, you should come to HackVAN, the upcoming HackDays event in your city. I’ll be there representing Shopify and helping people build kick-ass things with our API. We’re also bringing prizes!

Having attended two of these events in the past as a participant, I’m super-excited to be on the other side of the fence and helping people out. If you’re planning on coming, you should read the article I wrote about How to Write an App in 8 Hours (or Die Trying).

The event is being held on August 20th, which is the Saturday after GROW. The location is TBD, but I still recommend you head over to the HackVAN registration page and sign up. I’ll see you there!

Life Dial Status Update

Posted on July 18, 2011 by David

Giant Growth

Life Dial has been doing rather well since I launched it on the android market. So well in fact that it just passed Omnivore in active downloads despite the fact that the latter has been out since February.

I don’t think that Life Dial has an objectively larger audience than Omnivore, and I haven’t publicized one more than the other either. So why the large uptake? Continue reading →

Mucha-Inspired Webcomic Prints

Posted on July 14, 2011 by David

I’m a big fan of both Questionable Content and Dresden Codak. I got to meet the creators in person back in May when I attended TCAFand while I was there I picked up a couple of signed prints. Earlier this month I finally got around to taking the prints down to a local framing shop where they mounted them for me. Now I have them on my walls, and they look gorgeous. Here are some pics:

Both these prints are available online:

The Flying Developer Gets an Early Start

Posted on July 12, 2011 by David

No ‘real’ blog post today, but here’s a picture of my Dad helping me get to grips with some new-fangled technology:

And here’s me passing on the favour somewhat later to my nephew Arthur:

Sticking it Old School

Posted on July 4, 2011 by David

Here’s a shot from our team’s first monthly planning session last week, courtesy of Joey¹. Even though we have a huge amount of technology at our disposal, sticking post-its on the wall was the perfect way to prioritize our tasks for the next four weeks. Of course the first thing we did after this picture was taken was put the items into Basecamp, but physically writing everything out made it really easy to fiddle with priorities and add new items without worrying about squashing anyone else’s ‘edits’.

We totally stole this idea from BarCamp‘s scheduling sessions. I’ve never had the opportunity to go to an unconference, but from our own little experiment I can definitely see how this bottom-up approach to planning and organization has been a success there.

Specifics have been blurred out to protect our seekrit plans! ↩