A friend of mine who has done mostly professional web development is starting his journey in iOS development with SwiftUI.
He's done great work of finding answers to specific questions he's had on the process but I wanted to give him a list of "good things to be generally aware of so that you know the keywords to start googling when you hit these sorts of problems."
A lot of the "iOS development topics" lists I've seen were more around getting started with development in general, so focused more on things like good architectural patterns, or source control, etc. I wanted to give him a more focused list for iOS specifically, so I wrote one up -- sharing it here in case anyone finds themselves in a similar situation and finds it useful.
I don’t think it’s bad advice but having shipped multiple (really bad) games, I think it misses the two biggest/best pieces of advice I’ve gotten:
1. GDDs are probably a distraction if you’re a solo dev - prototyping and grayboxing a lot and looking for the fun mechanics without any art/music/story to get in the way or distract is essential
2. If you’re truly just starting (and don’t already have a sense of fun), absolute best way to start is to carbon-copy a game you find fun, then start adding/tweaking elements.
This both builds the mindset required to make games, and helps you get into the “fun iteration” loop quickly without getting bogged down in writing a lot of interesting technical systems that don’t end up contributing to the game in a meaningful way.
I haven't gotten too far with my test 13" MBA.
I booted it up and installed Xcode -- it took about 2 hours to install, which I don't understand. Now that it's installed I can't build my project without recompiling some dependencies so will be some time before I can properly compare it to my Intel 13" MBP on things that matter to me (compile-run-iterate on iOS apps).
If you have any specific questions about software or task speed I'm happy to answer though!
Out of curiosity - how do you normally interview? Is the risk that much greater when interviewing someone who already works for a direct competitor as opposed to someone who could go start at your direct competitor tomorrow?
If you want to be a solo/technical founder, I'd consider learning to build web apps a great first step - it's accessible, cross-platform, and flexible. There's also no shortage of resources online. On the frontend, React is commonly used and generally a safe choice. On the backend, some nodejs with heroku or docker should give you a gentle introduction (with the added advantage that you'll be learning the same language for both front and backend -- one less thing to worry about as you're starting).
Have you considered adding a background task to automatically push the data to e.g Dropbox once/day? I would love to have my data in a usable location without exporting it manually each time
Interesting article, IMO the single biggest "blind spot" gmail has that makes Hey look very attractive is the idea that users should be in control of the experience. Privacy is great, I think Hey's specific innovation goes beyond that though.
I have a lot of things I want to do. I also suffer from 'decision paralysis' -- rather than starting any one thing from my list, I avoid them all at once. During one of these "avoidance sessions" I stumbled on a reddit thread where someone else had the exact same problem.
shia.guru is the very beginning of a tool to help myself and others push themselves to spend more time on the things that they want to do rather than the things that are easy.
It works by trimming your TODO list to just ONE item for you to focus on -- with a promise to call you in an hour and check in on your progress.