I met two different couples who literally sold everything, drove to Florida, bought a boat, had an instructor on board for a week, and sailed away with no previous experience. Neither has gone past the Caribbean but they both did fine. One of them now runs a day charter on a catamaran.
I spent several years learning and improving sailing skills before heading off. 2-3 years of weekends and a few vacation weeks would probably do it if you started with that as your focus. It takes a lot of people that long to find a boat and get it set up the way you want anyway.
Cruising sailors love in Inreach too (at least in the Caribbean). It's great to be able to essentially text people at home with passage reports or just to keep up when you keep switching countries & don't want to constantly be buying new SIM cards (that don't work in lots of nice areas).
I have a full-on Iridium sat phone. I've only made 2 calls on it. Mostly it it gets used to download weather forecasts and text people back home. Weather option on the Inreach are getting better though they're a long way from good enough for offshore use. There seems to be enough demand that they'll get there though.
I'm travelling semi-permanently (away from "home" ~9 months now). I had to update OS X and Xcode recently. 11GB fortunately only took 2 days (and $60 of data charges) since I'm somewhere with ok cell LTE. I did have to delay the update for a month or two until I was somewhere I could do it.
In case people don't know, the reason for this is that AIS uses an already existing VHF channel (and on recreational craft sometimes even shares the antenna). AIS is to keep ships from running in to each other. It works great for that. Even on my 34' sailboat I use different means to keep land-based people aware of my location when at sea.
It's pretty easy to see a lot of AIS signals near land using MarineTraffic.com. Since it depends on land-based receivers it's not very up to date sometimes. It's got me 20 miles away right now since there's no closer receiver and that's where I was a few days ago. They do have higher level commercial plans with satellite data access.
What if I need to know about a ship out of line of sight in an emergency at sea? Then I'd call the USCG and they'd check AMVERS for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMVER
Given recent issues with piracy, it's not really a good idea to have a big publicly available database of where relatively slow moving ocean vessels are at a given time. Even if you had all of the world's AIS signals you'd find some gaps in certain parts of the world where vessels switch to receive-only mode.
You'll create your own Xcode project to try out the code. UI stuff in playgrounds works but it doesn't show you very well how to do table views in a real project.
Coding on a boat has it's ups and downs. I'm in an area with decent LTE now so it's not so bad. Having a partner for this course helps a lot.
tl;dr: Email course + a live session Q&A to teach you how to build a simple iOS app that fetches gists from the GitHub API and displays them in a table view. JSON + networking + showing results in UI.
It's a non-HIPAA controlled platform where we can try out things like pulse & respiration monitoring without worrying about FDA regulations that make developing medical devices a slow process. That particular dog tracker might not do it but some of them do: http://petpace.com/
The average difference is 8" but with tides it can be up to 12' and it changes constantly. It'd be really tough for the ships to handle in the confined space especially when eddies form along the edges and with currents changing over a period of hours. A lot of these ships only travel at 10-15 knots and they aren't very maneuverable.
I was recently on a sailboat going through Hell Gate on the East River in NYC. It has about a 6' tidal range. We can motor at 6 knots. When the tide was at peak flood into Long Island Sound we were doing about 1/2 knot over the ground. You can time an East River transit to work around the tides, the Panama Canal is too long for that to work.
(I don't recommend transiting Hell Gate under those conditions, the UN closed the river longer than they said they would and we only managed because there wasn't any wind. We should have anchored and waited a few hours, we would have gotten through almost as quickly.)
- I wrote the book using LeanPub which was a pretty good experience, especially if you're used to Markdown and Git
- Updating for Swift 2.0 the day before it was released wasn't too awful
- Sales have been about $1000 in 2 days
- So far about 70% of sales are from 2 emails lists: one from my blog at grokswift.com and the pre-release interest list on LeanPub. I sent a few lead up emails, a coming soon email on Monday night, a 15% discount at launch on Tuesday morning, and a reminder late on Tuesday.
- Posting to a Slack iOS developer group with a few thousand members where I'm pretty active only resulted in 2 sales. Same for a handful of Twitter posts and direct traffic from grokswift.com/book
I found the same thing. In the bit of rural Canada where I grew up, it was pretty standard for french elementary students to go on to english high school (with 1-2 classes/year in french, usually french & history or geography). We can all still speak french (with weaker vocab if we don't practice) but we didn't have issues with math/science jargon or having enough practice in english. A handful of students went to french high school but generally because they intended to go to a french university.
SEEKING WORK (native iOS), Remote (based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)
I design and build native iPhone and iPad apps. Most of these are distributed through the App Store but in some cases they’re only used within a company, as a tool for sales people or to work with custom hardware. I’ve been building apps for over 3 years. I’ve done every part of the process myself: starting with initial concepts then designing the interface, writing code, and submitting apps to the Apple App Store.
Most of my apps are under NDA but I've recently released a sailing weather forecast decoder: http://teakmobile.com/mafor
I've also done:
- daily deals apps
- robot controller over wifi
- custom SFDC sales scheduling and mapping iPad app
- v1.0 of a chat client with millions of users
- long-term care assessment iPad app
- real-time wi-fi automotive data collection and visualization app
Also available for App Store Submission, Beta Test Management, Code & App Store Consulting and Training.
I haven't had clients in Chicago but I would be very surprised if that weren't the case. I've done remote dev work (mostly iOS) for clients in Canada, Portland, and Minneapolis that paid better than $100/hr without working hard to increase rates. The one client who made an initial hourly offer started at $100/hr and I negotiated up from there with little resistance.
Remote gigs are a real possibility, even at $100/hr if you're a decent communicator and can get things done. I've had several clients within a day's drive that I've never met because it just wasn't necessary. It does help to be in a convenient time zone. Most clients I'll see once or twice a year.
I've talked to several local companies looking for freelance mobile web devs for interesting projects lately. They all want solo independent devs since (1) they're small and built their companies on reputation and (2) they've had better experiences working one-on-one than with big firms in the past. They all have clients or partners that are large companies.
Don't expect to be able to bill 40 hours a week or have no expenses though.
If I were looking to make $10k quick, I'd cold call local web/marketing agencies and propose having them offer iOS app development to their clients. A lot of them are thinking about it but don't know how to get started.
SEEKING WORK (native iOS), Remote (based in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)
I design and build native iPhone and iPad apps. Most of these are distributed through the App Store but in some cases they’re only used within a company, as a tool for sales people or to work with custom hardware. I’ve been building apps for over 3 years. I’ve done every part of the process myself: starting with initial concepts then designing the interface, writing code, and submitting apps to the Apple App Store.
Most of my apps are under NDA but I've recently released a sailing weather forecast decoder: http://teakmobile.com/mafor
I've also done:
- daily deals apps
- robot controller over wifi
- custom SFDC sales scheduling and mapping iPad app, v1.0 of a chat client with millions of users
- long-term care assessment iPad app,
- real-time wi-fi automotive data collection and visualization app
Also available for App Store Submission, Beta Test Management, Code & App Store Consulting and Training.
I spent several years learning and improving sailing skills before heading off. 2-3 years of weekends and a few vacation weeks would probably do it if you started with that as your focus. It takes a lot of people that long to find a boat and get it set up the way you want anyway.