Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS development, Apple, and the like.

00:00:07 ◼   ► I'm your host David Smith. I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia. This is show number 95 and today is Friday, November 16th.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Alright, so this is, as I said in the last show, I'm going to be talking, kind of working through a question and answer series for a little while.

00:00:26 ◼   ► So again, I'd encourage you, I thank you for all the response that I've received, and encourage

00:00:30 ◼   ► you if you have thoughts or things you want me to talk about, just reach out to me on

00:00:33 ◼   ► Twitter or App.net or email, and I'll be happy to kind of put them on the list, see what

00:00:38 ◼   ► kind of shakes out, and go from there.

00:00:41 ◼   ► So today I'm going to be answering a question from Mark, who emailed me asking about this,

00:00:46 ◼   ► and I'm probably just saying, if you contact me on Twitter or App.net in a public way,

00:00:51 ◼   ► I will use your name.

00:00:52 ◼   ► If you email me, I will just use your first name unless you explicitly say otherwise.

00:00:57 ◼   ► So this is Mark via email.

00:00:59 ◼   ► All right, so basically he was asking how I decided to go with Dark Sky Weather API

00:01:04 ◼   ► and check the weather.

00:01:06 ◼   ► How do you decide if you're going to use a third-party API?

00:01:08 ◼   ► How do you decide kind of the costing for that?

00:01:11 ◼   ► Obviously a lot of these services have ongoing costs or per-use costs and things.

00:01:16 ◼   ► And so how do you kind of balance that as you're developing an application?

00:01:19 ◼   ► And when do you break from kind of rolling your own versus using something that someone

00:01:25 ◼   ► else sort of has built and uses and you pay for on an ongoing basis?

00:01:29 ◼   ► And I think it's a great question and it actually is very timely for me.

00:01:33 ◼   ► I'm working on a big update to my recipe book, my recipe book manager.

00:01:37 ◼   ► And one of the things I'm doing is Cloud Sync to sync recipes between the applications.

00:01:42 ◼   ► There'll be no iPhone versions, a few things like that that I'm working on.

00:01:46 ◼   ► And the key thing in this, though, is I've been struggling on it basically since, I guess

00:01:52 ◼   ► for the last 18 months or so.

00:01:54 ◼   ► When iCloud was first announced at WWDC last summer, not this past one, I mean about the

00:02:01 ◼   ► full 18 months ago, I was like, "Oh, that's great.

00:02:03 ◼   ► I've been thinking of doing a sync option for my recipe book, and I think this will

00:02:06 ◼   ► be great.

00:02:07 ◼   ► I'll try to use iCloud."

00:02:08 ◼   ► I tried to use iCloud, and it was kind of just a nightmare.

00:02:13 ◼   ► I use core data, and there's in theory core data iCloud support, but it's temperamental

00:02:18 ◼   ► and buggy and all kinds of things that went wrong.

00:02:20 ◼   ► That's why I got discouraged and didn't work on it.

00:02:23 ◼   ► That was unfortunate because the feature and the functionality would have been really great

00:02:27 ◼   ► to have given to my users 18 months ago.

00:02:29 ◼   ► That would have been awesome.

00:02:30 ◼   ► But I just got discouraged from trying to implement a third-party library and API into

00:02:36 ◼   ► it to do it.

00:02:38 ◼   ► Imperium came out, which is a third party thing for syncing that looked really promising,

00:02:43 ◼   ► and I've tried it and it worked pretty well, but it kind of frustrated me a little bit

00:02:48 ◼   ► on pricing.

00:02:49 ◼   ► It's a little bit expensive for the number of users that I expect to have.

00:02:52 ◼   ► But it also just kind of frustrated me.

00:02:55 ◼   ► Whenever you're working with something that's a third party, you're always kind of struggling

00:02:59 ◼   ► with it's never going to fit exactly what you want to do, and there's going to be these

00:03:02 ◼   ► little holes.

00:03:03 ◼   ► There's going to be these little problems that you're going to have to be working around.

00:03:06 ◼   ► It's fine most of the time.

00:03:08 ◼   ► Generally, you just kind of make that work and you just kind of adapt, but it can be

00:03:12 ◼   ► very frustrating.

00:03:13 ◼   ► And the same thing with capitalist and periodic.

00:03:16 ◼   ► I got like 80, 90 percent of it working, and the last 10 percent was just a really big

00:03:20 ◼   ► sort of challenge for me.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And so I kind of lost interest and moved on, which are other things, developed and created

00:03:26 ◼   ► and launched Check the Weather.

00:03:28 ◼   ► In the meantime, without exaggeration, I started working on Cloud Sync, I got stuck, and that's

00:03:33 ◼   ► part of what motivated me to work on Check the Weather is that I was kind of looking

00:03:37 ◼   ► for an escape. And that's not a good place to be. I mean, it's never going to be a good

00:03:40 ◼   ► thing if I'm discouraged from making my product better because of some of the drawbacks of

00:03:45 ◼   ► the third-party API that I was going to be thinking about using.

00:03:49 ◼   ► And so what I'm ultimately doing is I'm going to be rolling it myself. I've built from scratch

00:03:54 ◼   ► in a relatively short amount of time a Rails sync application that will do all the syncing

00:03:59 ◼   ► for me. And it's actually been really exciting and really fun. And like you may have noticed,

00:04:04 ◼   ► there's only going to be one show this week. That's partly because I've really enjoyed

00:04:07 ◼   ► this process. It's really interesting to build this thing from scratch that's tailored to

00:04:12 ◼   ► exactly my needs. It does exactly what I want. It's fun to make it performant and stretch

00:04:19 ◼   ► myself a little bit. I hadn't done a lot of Rails work recently, and it's great to kind

00:04:22 ◼   ► of get into that. Again, it's kind of fun and it works. I have it working in about a

00:04:26 ◼   ► week. You know, this sort of end-to-end sync solution that works dynamically across multiple

00:04:31 ◼   ► devices and so on is great. And the thing that's remarkable to me about that is rolling

00:04:36 ◼   ► myself and rolling it myself in this case was really good. I've been excited about it,

00:04:41 ◼   ► I've got the feature implemented, I think it's going to be ready soon, it's great, it'll

00:04:45 ◼   ► be much more cost effective than a lot of other options because I rolled it myself,

00:04:49 ◼   ► I just put it on Heroku or some other Rails web server and it cost me something but it

00:04:55 ◼   ► won't be an insane amount of money by any means, but it's always a struggle.

00:05:01 ◼   ► And I ran into this again with weather APIs.

00:05:03 ◼   ► You always have this tension where I could pull the raw source data from a lot of systems,

00:05:09 ◼   ► combine them together, analyze them, process them, do a whole bunch of stuff, and use that.

00:05:15 ◼   ► I mean, all Dark Sky does.

00:05:16 ◼   ► You can read it on their website.

00:05:18 ◼   ► Dark Sky takes the standard National Weather Service radar maps and processes them with

00:05:24 ◼   ► their own proprietary super genius algorithm to estimate expected rainfall.

00:05:29 ◼   ► That's all they do.

00:05:30 ◼   ► That is in theory something that I could do.

00:05:32 ◼   ► That is something that I could replace.

00:05:33 ◼   ► That is something that I could sort of get into and do myself.

00:05:36 ◼   ► But for the case of dark sky, it doesn't make sense.

00:05:39 ◼   ► And I've been kind of struggling with this all week since I got this question from Mark.

00:05:43 ◼   ► Was what do I, how do I make that decision ultimately?

00:05:47 ◼   ► Because it's really kind of a hard thing to know.

00:05:49 ◼   ► Where is this value that is worthwhile

00:05:54 ◼   ► to outsource something to somewhere else?

00:05:58 ◼   ► And when is that value to keep it to yourself?

00:06:01 ◼   ► I think where I've ended up on

00:06:04 ◼   ► is that you want to outsource the things

00:06:06 ◼   ► when someone else is doing it a lot better

00:06:09 ◼   ► than you could ever do.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And that applies to almost any circumstance.

00:06:15 ◼   ► And it's a theme I've talked about

00:06:17 ◼   ► certainly on the show before.

00:06:15 ◼   ► I outsource the creation of the icons for my applications, because I'm not an artist.

00:06:20 ◼   ► I'm not an illustrator.

00:06:25 ◼   ► And they do a job that's 10 to 20 to 100 times better than what I could ever do.

00:06:26 ◼   ► So I'm always going to outsource that.

00:06:33 ◼   ► In this case, there's a certain amount of sophistication that goes into building a weather model,

00:06:35 ◼   ► that goes into managing that.

00:06:40 ◼   ► That is something that I don't think I have the expertise to get into,

00:06:41 ◼   ► nor do I think it would be wise for me to gain that expertise.

00:06:44 ◼   ► I know a bit more about weather forecasting

00:06:46 ◼   ► than I did before I started the project,

00:06:48 ◼   ► but I don't expect to ever be an expert in meteorology

00:06:52 ◼   ► or should have done the study needed to get into it.

00:06:55 ◼   ► And so it makes a lot of sense for me to outsource

00:06:57 ◼   ► the cost of that.

00:06:59 ◼   ► So the second part of what Mark was asking,

00:07:01 ◼   ► which is something that I think is important to think about,

00:07:04 ◼   ► is how do you manage the cost of that?

00:07:06 ◼   ► A lot of these things are really tricky for an app.

00:07:09 ◼   ► and the way app pricing tends to work.

00:07:12 ◼   ► So typically, I get an upfront amount of money from my user.

00:07:15 ◼   ► They buy it, whatever they get.

00:07:17 ◼   ► I get $1.40 if it's a $2 app or something like that

00:07:19 ◼   ► after Apple's cut.

00:07:20 ◼   ► I get that $1.40 from them.

00:07:22 ◼   ► Now, that has to theoretically support

00:07:26 ◼   ► all of the ongoing costs that are

00:07:28 ◼   ► going to be associated with that user

00:07:30 ◼   ► and also obviously leave me with some profit.

00:07:33 ◼   ► Otherwise, there's no point.

00:07:35 ◼   ► And so the way that I think about this--

00:07:38 ◼   ► And it's definitely a struggle.

00:07:39 ◼   ► You kind of look at these things and you say, I'm going

00:07:42 ◼   ► to be spending so many hundreds of dollars a month, or

00:07:44 ◼   ► so many thousands of dollars a month, on hosting, on

00:07:47 ◼   ► external resources, on all the things that go into it, on

00:07:50 ◼   ► support even.

00:07:52 ◼   ► And so every user kind of has a cost.

00:07:54 ◼   ► And the only way that I've been able to sort of do this

00:07:57 ◼   ► rationally-- and it seems to work really well, so I'm going

00:07:59 ◼   ► to kind of walk through it here.

00:08:01 ◼   ► When you're thinking about using a third party API and

00:08:03 ◼   ► you want to kind of judge way away all these different

00:08:05 ◼   ► things is you have to be able to calculate cost per user.

00:08:09 ◼   ► If you can't do that, you're going to be

00:08:11 ◼   ► kind of floundering around.

00:08:12 ◼   ► And so you have to be able to say, this is roughly what it

00:08:15 ◼   ► costs for a user of my application.

00:08:18 ◼   ► A typical user costs this much per month, this much per

00:08:21 ◼   ► year, the intervals don't really matter.

00:08:24 ◼   ► What matters is that you can say, this is what it costs.

00:08:28 ◼   ► And I did a lot of this analysis for my weather APIs.

00:08:31 ◼   ► So they have different pricing structures.

00:08:33 ◼   ► A lot of them, like the one I'm on right now, is based on I get 500,000 hits a day for a

00:08:39 ◼   ► certain amount of money, and I can then look at the number of hits I get per user.

00:08:47 ◼   ► For an average user, I get so many hits that hit costs me so much.

00:08:51 ◼   ► That's my average cost per month per user.

00:08:53 ◼   ► And I can reverse my way back into that.

00:08:56 ◼   ► And that gives me a number, and that number is vitally important, because having a number

00:09:00 ◼   ► lets me kind of work out if that's going to work financially.

00:09:04 ◼   ► And so the way that I do with a lot of these things, I'll take the cost per user and work

00:09:09 ◼   ► out what my cost per year per user is and look at the purchase price and compare the

00:09:14 ◼   ► two.

00:09:15 ◼   ► Because for me, I think I have somewhat of a responsibility to support an application

00:09:21 ◼   ► for about a year.

00:09:22 ◼   ► Beyond that, I think you have a fairer expectation

00:09:27 ◼   ► that that user may need to give you some extra money.

00:09:32 ◼   ► That's not to say that you necessarily will,

00:09:36 ◼   ► but from a planning perspective,

00:09:39 ◼   ► I look at it as a one-year timeline.

00:09:40 ◼   ► That from when you gave me your $1.40,

00:09:42 ◼   ► I'm going to support you for a year.

00:09:45 ◼   ► And so if all the API and server costs

00:09:47 ◼   ► and all the things that go into that work,

00:09:49 ◼   ► work out to be, say, they're 50 cents,

00:09:49 ◼   ► Say they're $0.60, say they're $0.80, whatever that is,

00:09:52 ◼   ► you can then look at the two and you can balance them.

00:09:55 ◼   ► And that's a really important thing from a pricing

00:09:57 ◼   ► perspective.

00:09:58 ◼   ► Say it's going to cost you $0.70 a year to have that user.

00:10:04 ◼   ► That means your app really can't be $0.99.

00:10:07 ◼   ► It just can't.

00:10:08 ◼   ► You'll break even on every sale, and that's kind of pointless.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And so it's really important to have a good grounding on that

00:10:16 ◼   ► and to see, does this make sense?

00:10:19 ◼   ► Does it work?

00:10:20 ◼   ► And I ran the math for Dark Sky, for my weather API,

00:10:23 ◼   ► for my server hosting, all the things that go into it.

00:10:25 ◼   ► And it's like, the math works out, this makes sense,

00:10:27 ◼   ► I'll run with it.

00:10:28 ◼   ► But if you don't have the number, you just can't do these.

00:10:31 ◼   ► And so that's kind of the way I balance

00:10:33 ◼   ► those types of things.

00:10:34 ◼   ► And sort of to loop back to what I was talking about first,

00:10:37 ◼   ► and I'll finish off on that tack,

00:10:39 ◼   ► is it's important to understand that

00:10:42 ◼   ► the tools you use to build something

00:10:47 ◼   ► dramatically impact the quality of the thing,

00:10:52 ◼   ► and not just because of the intrinsic properties

00:10:55 ◼   ► of the service you're using,

00:10:57 ◼   ► but in terms of how that changes you as a developer.

00:10:59 ◼   ► And this is something that I sort of knew before,

00:11:03 ◼   ► but has definitely been made clear to me

00:11:07 ◼   ► with this my recipe book sync situation,

00:11:09 ◼   ► is I had been so apprehensive, so resistant,

00:11:13 ◼   ► so reluctant to work on this problem,

00:11:16 ◼   ► because every time I tried to do it

00:11:18 ◼   ► using someone else's tools,

00:11:20 ◼   ► I would go great for a couple of days,

00:11:24 ◼   ► get it to look like it was working,

00:11:25 ◼   ► and then the wheels would come off the wagon

00:11:27 ◼   ► when I was doing some testing.

00:11:29 ◼   ► And there'd be some problem that I either couldn't solve,

00:11:32 ◼   ► or in order to solve, I had to make some strange compromises

00:11:35 ◼   ► or do some really hacky, weird things.

00:11:38 ◼   ► And that just frustrated me,

00:11:40 ◼   ► and so I wasn't working on the problem.

00:11:42 ◼   ► And so that meant that that service hasn't existed

00:11:46 ◼   ► for these users for a long time.

00:11:48 ◼   ► And that's kind of a sad thing.

00:11:50 ◼   ► I'm kind of bummed that that is the way it ended up working out.

00:11:52 ◼   ► But I'm glad I went through that experience,

00:11:55 ◼   ► because otherwise I wouldn't have known what I was missing.

00:12:00 ◼   ► I wouldn't have known that about myself,

00:12:03 ◼   ► that I like solving problems.

00:12:06 ◼   ► I like working with sharp tools.

00:12:09 ◼   ► And if a tool turns out to not be sharp,

00:12:14 ◼   ► if I am working with it,

00:12:18 ◼   ► and it seems like no matter what I do,

00:12:20 ◼   ► I'm always running into frustrations or problems,

00:12:22 ◼   ► that's going to really limit my ability

00:12:25 ◼   ► to make an excellent product.

00:12:27 ◼   ► And so from working on any API

00:12:29 ◼   ► or integrating with anything,

00:12:31 ◼   ► it means that you need to be really comfortable

00:12:32 ◼   ► with what that is.

00:12:35 ◼   ► And sometimes you're going to roll your own.

00:12:36 ◼   ► And rolling your own is,

00:12:34 ◼   ► but you want to avoid, to some degree,

00:12:37 ◼   ► the kind of the not invented here syndrome kind of problem

00:12:40 ◼   ► where you're always inventing your own thing

00:12:42 ◼   ► because you have no,

00:12:44 ◼   ► like you're suspicious of other people's work

00:12:46 ◼   ► or you're kind of a control freak or things.

00:12:48 ◼   ► That's certainly something you want to be careful of.

00:12:51 ◼   ► You can definitely get caught up in that

00:12:52 ◼   ► and reinventing too many wheels,

00:12:55 ◼   ► but some wheels are worth reinventing.

00:12:57 ◼   ► Some wheels are things that you will have a better product

00:13:00 ◼   ► for going through and working on

00:13:03 ◼   ► you would if you just sort of use all,

00:13:06 ◼   ► it's combining something from off the shelf components.

00:13:08 ◼   ► It's making something custom that solves your problem

00:13:10 ◼   ► perfectly is often really good.

00:13:13 ◼   ► And you want to do whatever motivates you.

00:13:15 ◼   ► If you're, like I don't really have an interest in

00:13:18 ◼   ► being a meteorologist and making a weather model,

00:13:20 ◼   ► so I'm going to outsource that to someone else.

00:13:22 ◼   ► But I do enjoy making somewhat sophisticated web systems

00:13:27 ◼   ► that handle syncing and finding clever ways to do caching

00:13:30 ◼   ► to do smart updates and all kinds of stuff.

00:13:33 ◼   ► Those are interesting problems.

00:13:34 ◼   ► And so solving those is fun, and that's what I've been doing.

00:13:40 ◼   ► That's a little bit of a round-to-round answer.

00:13:42 ◼   ► But basically, you got to work.

00:13:43 ◼   ► You got to know there's two costs whenever you're

00:13:46 ◼   ► going to be doing something.

00:13:47 ◼   ► There's the cost that's physical,

00:13:48 ◼   ► like the monetary cost, and you have to balance that.

00:13:51 ◼   ► And then the second cost is the cost of your time

00:13:54 ◼   ► and your effort and, more importantly, your motivation

00:13:57 ◼   ► to use whatever that is.

00:13:58 ◼   ► And so keep those two things in mind,

00:14:00 ◼   ► I think you'll be pretty good when you're going to be working on a new product or going

00:14:04 ◼   ► to be thinking about a new service that you're going to integrate with that isn't going to

00:14:08 ◼   ► make sense financially and isn't going to make sense from your motivation and enjoyment

00:14:13 ◼   ► perspective.

00:14:14 ◼   ► All right, that's it for today's show.

00:14:16 ◼   ► As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns, complaints, I'm on Twitter @_davidsmith

00:14:21 ◼   ► and I'm on app.net @davidsmith.

00:14:22 ◼   ► As always, like I've been saying, if you have questions, this is a great time to hit those

00:14:27 ◼   ► those out to me. I'll be accumulating them if they don't get your question, I'm

00:14:29 ◼   ► sorry, but I'll just be kind of working through them as makes sense, and

00:14:32 ◼   ► otherwise if you guys have a great weekend, great week, and I'll talk