Under the Radar

00:00:00 ◼   ► Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development.

00:00:04 ◼   ► I'm Marco Arment.

00:00:06 ◼   ► And I'm David Smith.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Under the Radar is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:11 ◼   ► So you as the listener would probably not be aware of this, but Marco and I have actually

00:00:18 ◼   ► been doing a fair bit of traveling recently, and so we've been having an interesting cycle

00:00:23 ◼   ► of recording shows slightly out of sequence or bunching them up.

00:00:26 ◼   ► But for me, the most recent thing was the last week I went on a 110-mile Appalachian

00:00:36 ◼   ► trail backpacking trip and did it by myself and ended up with a lot of time to, I guess,

00:00:45 ◼   ► as I was wandering around, to think about my work, think about the things I was making.

00:00:53 ◼   ► And as a result of that, I think it came up with a topic that would be interesting to

00:00:56 ◼   ► discuss here.

00:00:57 ◼   ► I guess you could say I developed some perspective while I was out on my walk.

00:01:05 ◼   ► And specifically, something that I kept coming back to was this feeling that one of the things

00:01:11 ◼   ► that is the biggest challenge I face in my work, and I think as an independent is something

00:01:17 ◼   ► that is a pretty common challenge to deal with, is this feeling of how do you deal with

00:01:25 ◼   ► difficult, hard, often not particularly interesting problems that are necessary or are part of

00:01:34 ◼   ► the work that you do.

00:01:36 ◼   ► Because as I was walking along, I was thinking about the tasks that I'd like to do in my

00:01:41 ◼   ► apps.

00:01:42 ◼   ► What are the big features?

00:01:43 ◼   ► What are the things that I want to tackle?

00:01:46 ◼   ► And I noticed that almost everything on the list at this point, for a lot of my apps are

00:01:51 ◼   ► fairly mature, the things that I run into now are these difficult, hard problems that

00:02:01 ◼   ► I know are solvable.

00:02:02 ◼   ► It's not like I'm doing some kind of R&D thing where I just want to go and invent some crazy

00:02:08 ◼   ► new thing.

00:02:09 ◼   ► These are problems that I feel like should be in the realm of solvable, but they're difficult,

00:02:13 ◼   ► but they're hard.

00:02:15 ◼   ► And being motivated to tackle them when it isn't the situation that I have a boss who's

00:02:23 ◼   ► assigning them to me, like, "Here's this feature that you must implement.

00:02:27 ◼   ► Here's what you're going to work on for the next three weeks."

00:02:29 ◼   ► If that were the case, that might be a little bit easier.

00:02:32 ◼   ► But when I have to choose to undertake the pain that I know is going to be implementing

00:02:39 ◼   ► that feature, going down the road of lots of dead ends, lots of false starts, and attempts

00:02:47 ◼   ► at this particular solution that turns out to not work out, being motivated to do that

00:02:53 ◼   ► is something that I struggle with.

00:02:56 ◼   ► But in retrospect, when I look at it, some of the features that I'm most proud of tend

00:03:02 ◼   ► to be features where I was able to get over that hump and actually start working, actually

00:03:08 ◼   ► get into it, actually solve it.

00:03:10 ◼   ► And then I can look back, and usually that's the cool stuff.

00:03:14 ◼   ► That's the stuff that separates my apps from my competitors, are trying to tackle these

00:03:20 ◼   ► features.

00:03:22 ◼   ► And one thing that I think--and so as a jumping in point for this, I would have wanted to

00:03:26 ◼   ► say is, I've always admired with you, Marco, that it seems like these are the features

00:03:31 ◼   ► that you almost seem to relish in doing, that going off on these several-month, like, visual

00:03:38 ◼   ► vision quests where you dive down into these really complicated, low-level, or hard-to-solve

00:03:46 ◼   ► problems, and then coming back with really cool solutions is something that you've done

00:03:51 ◼   ► time and time again for all of the products that you've made.

00:03:54 ◼   ► And so as I was sitting there, and we're wandering around and thinking about this, I was like,

00:03:58 ◼   ► "You know what I need to do?

00:03:59 ◼   ► I need to ask Marco, like, how do you motivate yourself to tackle those kinds of problems

00:04:05 ◼   ► when you know they're going to be difficult to get started with?"

00:04:09 ◼   ► - I think it's a lot of, like, what satisfies you as a programmer?

00:04:15 ◼   ► Like, what do you most like to do?

00:04:19 ◼   ► And this is different for a lot of people.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Typically, what's fairly common among most programmers is that we like to generally work

00:04:25 ◼   ► on new things, at least.

00:04:27 ◼   ► So that's like one big gimme, is like, we are almost always motivated to work on something

00:04:34 ◼   ► new that interests us.

00:04:36 ◼   ► For me, one of those things is tricky, low-level code.

00:04:42 ◼   ► Some kind of, like, low-level dealing with bits or bytes or sound or algorithm-type things

00:04:52 ◼   ► that aren't too academically hard, but that require low-level messing around.

00:04:59 ◼   ► I always really enjoy that stuff.

00:05:01 ◼   ► So, you know, in Overcast, there's things like the audio engine, you know, all the effects,

00:05:08 ◼   ► the smart speed and voice boost effects.

00:05:11 ◼   ► That stuff always, I just enjoy it.

00:05:14 ◼   ► And when there's something like that that I enjoy, you know, like most programmers,

00:05:18 ◼   ► I think I would rather work on the kind of thing I enjoy, even if it means, you know,

00:05:24 ◼   ► ignoring or procrastinating the more boring things that I probably should also do.

00:05:28 ◼   ► I think this is a problem most programmers have.

00:05:30 ◼   ► The only question is what those interesting things are.

00:05:32 ◼   ► I mean, to me, like, here I was, like, writing this crazy, you know, watch offline transcoding

00:05:39 ◼   ► engine, and at the same time, Overcast is almost three years old and I've never had

00:05:46 ◼   ► an email change form, and my password resets are, I think, a little bit broken.

00:05:51 ◼   ► That is totally backwards priorities.

00:05:54 ◼   ► Like I really, I get emails from people, I'd say almost every day, saying, "Hey, is there

00:06:01 ◼   ► a way for me to change my account email address?"

00:06:04 ◼   ► And the answer is no, there isn't.

00:06:06 ◼   ► And there really should be.

00:06:07 ◼   ► I should have done that, like, on week one or week two of Overcast almost three years

00:06:12 ◼   ► ago, but I haven't, because it's never, you know, the idea of doing that is, like, you

00:06:19 ◼   ► know, terminally uninteresting to me, to the point where anything else that I have to do

00:06:24 ◼   ► with the app has taken priority over that for the last two and a half years.

00:06:30 ◼   ► And so for me, like, diving into these really hard, tricky problems is, you know, it's often

00:06:37 ◼   ► procrastination, and it's what I like to do.

00:06:41 ◼   ► It's the kind of thing I like to do.

00:06:43 ◼   ► For me, what's heavily motivating usually is either things that make me money directly,

00:06:52 ◼   ► like, you know, writing an ad system.

00:06:55 ◼   ► Writing an ad system has actually been a lot more work than I expected it to be.

00:06:58 ◼   ► It's, you know, it's not, I'm not writing a whole network like AdSense or anything,

00:07:02 ◼   ► but just putting the parts in place to have a decent ad system that's good for both me

00:07:08 ◼   ► and the buyers of the ads and the users and, you know, all the different, like, little

00:07:13 ◼   ► management tools you need, like the ability to, like, to monitor how they're doing and

00:07:17 ◼   ► give people stats and issue refunds if necessary and things like that.

00:07:20 ◼   ► You know, I'm having to build all this stuff from scratch, and I've been mostly motivated

00:07:25 ◼   ► to do that pretty well because it is directly related to how I'm making money, and it's

00:07:30 ◼   ► doing well so far.

00:07:31 ◼   ► So that motivates me on that angle, but also I get very heavily motivated by doing something

00:07:38 ◼   ► cool with, you know, with low-level stuff.

00:07:40 ◼   ► You know, like this morning, so we're doing, we're actually doing live shows.

00:07:44 ◼   ► As we mentioned on this show, I think a couple of weeks ago, we are doing Under the Radar

00:07:49 ◼   ► live at CocoConf at WBC.

00:07:51 ◼   ► CocoConf is running a conference called Next Door, which is, like, literally next door

00:07:56 ◼   ► down the block from the, from Musco, or from the San Jose Convention Center where WBC is

00:08:01 ◼   ► being held, and we will be doing this show live that week on the Tuesday, which is, I

00:08:05 ◼   ► think, June 6th, right?

00:08:08 ◼   ► At about 1.45 PM Pacific.

00:08:11 ◼   ► And I'm also, we're also doing ATP live the day before, the evening before at CocoConf,

00:08:17 ◼   ► I mean, sorry, at AltConf, rather.

00:08:20 ◼   ► And so we're doing these live shows, and I thought, you know, it would be nice if I

00:08:24 ◼   ► had a soundboard app for ATP and a timer app for this show to show on my computer screen

00:08:32 ◼   ► during the show.

00:08:34 ◼   ► So this morning, I spent this morning writing a soundboard.

00:08:38 ◼   ► There are a million soundboard apps out there, but none of them were exactly what I wanted.

00:08:41 ◼   ► I wanted, of course, my own custom thing, because I'm picky like that.

00:08:44 ◼   ► And so I spent the morning writing a soundboard.

00:08:46 ◼   ► I was woken up early by my allergies, I couldn't breathe anymore, so I figured, let's get to

00:08:49 ◼   ► programming.

00:08:50 ◼   ► Can't sleep anymore, so let's get to programming.

00:08:53 ◼   ► So that was, you know, novel, it was kind of dealing with audio stuff, because of course

00:08:59 ◼   ► I had to build in things like automatically detecting when the output device becomes a

00:09:03 ◼   ► unavailable and putting up a little alert thing on the top so I noticed that if it happens

00:09:09 ◼   ► during recording.

00:09:10 ◼   ► Stuff I'm never gonna really need.

00:09:12 ◼   ► Like I'm really, that makes no sense.

00:09:15 ◼   ► I shouldn't have written my own soundboard app.

00:09:18 ◼   ► There's many of them in the app store, on the Mac app store, there's probably even more

00:09:22 ◼   ► on iOS, and there's probably even more of them outside of the app store.

00:09:28 ◼   ► But I wrote it anyway, because I had a few hours to kill, I was delirious from waking

00:09:32 ◼   ► up too early on allergy medicine, and I decided, you know what, this is gonna be a fun thing

00:09:36 ◼   ► to do.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And I approached the watch offline playback thing with pretty much the same motivations

00:09:44 ◼   ► minus the allergy component, because it was the winter time.

00:09:47 ◼   ► And my motivation there was really like, I want to, you know, I was, I wanted to make

00:09:56 ◼   ► this feature, and why I wanted to make it I guess we can get into some other time or

00:10:00 ◼   ► maybe later, but I wanted to make this feature, and I knew it was not going to be used by

00:10:06 ◼   ► a lot of people.

00:10:08 ◼   ► But I thought if I'm going to do this feature I need to do it well.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And the biggest problem was, you know, on the, like transferring files to the watch,

00:10:17 ◼   ► like there's no, I couldn't do smart speed on the watch, and the file transfers were

00:10:21 ◼   ► giant and too slow to transfer.

00:10:23 ◼   ► So I decided, let me see if I can write a transcoding engine.

00:10:27 ◼   ► Because iPhones are pretty fast these days.

00:10:30 ◼   ► And so what this, this was kind of like a perfect storm of motivations for me to do

00:10:37 ◼   ► something, which is that it was a hard technical challenge, none of my competitors as far as

00:10:43 ◼   ► I know were doing it, and it accomplished something that I think most people thought

00:10:51 ◼   ► wasn't possible or wouldn't have thought to do.

00:10:55 ◼   ► And I love that combination.

00:10:56 ◼   ► Like to me that's a huge motivator.

00:10:58 ◼   ► And then to also involve this low level audio stuff that I enjoy so much was just the cherry

00:11:05 ◼   ► on top.

00:11:06 ◼   ► And then of course optimization, trying to make the trans codes faster.

00:11:10 ◼   ► It's a fun game to play when you're a programmer.

00:11:11 ◼   ► Like hey, you know, if I change the way I do this it becomes ten times faster.

00:11:15 ◼   ► Let's see how many times I can do that.

00:11:17 ◼   ► And it ends up just being very satisfying.

00:11:21 ◼   ► And this is, this is one of the problems with being an indie and not having anybody like

00:11:26 ◼   ► telling me what I need to be working on.

00:11:29 ◼   ► That often times these kind of deep dives into difficult technical features, often times

00:11:34 ◼   ► these are not a good idea.

00:11:35 ◼   ► Often times they're not an efficient use of your time.

00:11:38 ◼   ► In fact I would say probably most of the time they aren't an efficient use of your time.

00:11:43 ◼   ► But because I defined my own, you know, to do list basically, and that's one of the benefits

00:11:49 ◼   ► of doing your own products, because I defined my own to do list I basically take the indulgence

00:11:56 ◼   ► of doing cool things like this.

00:11:57 ◼   ► Because let's be honest, it is largely an indulgence to be able to do stuff like this.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Because you know, a lot of times you're not going to get paid back on.

00:12:04 ◼   ► I mean I did this entire watch offline playback feature and so far it's being used by something

00:12:09 ◼   ► like .2% of users every day.

00:12:12 ◼   ► It's very, very low according to my awesome home built analytics, which I also built.

00:12:17 ◼   ► But it actually isn't awesome.

00:12:19 ◼   ► It is home built analytics.

00:12:20 ◼   ► I would not describe it as awesome.

00:12:22 ◼   ► But so you know, it's being used by very few people.

00:12:25 ◼   ► It probably isn't the best idea for business to have done it, if I'm honest with myself.

00:12:31 ◼   ► But it was a really hard problem that satisfied me immensely while working on it.

00:12:36 ◼   ► It is right in my wheelhouse of like low level audio stuff that I enjoy working on so much.

00:12:41 ◼   ► And it gave me a competitive advantage, even though it's a very, very small one.

00:12:46 ◼   ► But it gave me a competitive advantage, at least for the time being.

00:12:49 ◼   ► And I'm sure that won't last very long.

00:12:51 ◼   ► But for the time being, it's there.

00:12:52 ◼   ► And so all those, it just, it forms motivation when it has a combination like that.

00:12:59 ◼   ► Whereas if you are somebody who doesn't like working on low level C code, or dealing with

00:13:04 ◼   ► core audio stuff, or whatever your hard problem that's facing you might be, if that doesn't

00:13:12 ◼   ► interest you, I totally get why you wouldn't want to do it, or why you'd procrastinate

00:13:17 ◼   ► it or just try to find ways around doing it.

00:13:21 ◼   ► And there's lots of things like that for me.

00:13:23 ◼   ► Just not this kind of thing.

00:13:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause I feel like what I'm hearing is it's the, A, it's like the first step is

00:13:30 ◼   ► to kind of try and understand yourself, and understand what things are going to, what

00:13:40 ◼   ► things are you going to enjoy building?

00:13:42 ◼   ► Are you going to be motivated to build?

00:13:43 ◼   ► What's the kind of thing, what would feel like low level audio stuff sounds awful to

00:13:48 ◼   ► me?

00:13:49 ◼   ► My little experience with that has always been pain and suffering, rather than joy and

00:13:56 ◼   ► delight.

00:13:58 ◼   ► And so for me, those probably aren't the directions that would motivate me to go into.

00:14:04 ◼   ► And I think maybe there's something A, interesting in understanding that you and I in some ways

00:14:10 ◼   ► are as similar professionally as two people could be in some ways.

00:14:16 ◼   ► We've both been doing basically the same job for the last eight years.

00:14:22 ◼   ► We do it in sort of fairly similar ways.

00:14:25 ◼   ► We make our living fairly similarly.

00:14:27 ◼   ► But even still, we have these very, I think, very different preferences and things that

00:14:34 ◼   ► we would actually, the parts of the job that we actually enjoy.

00:14:36 ◼   ► And so it's good to just, I think, be introspective probably first at understanding, you know,

00:14:45 ◼   ► when I see myself procrastinating, I think one of the things that I've started to try

00:14:50 ◼   ► and ask myself is like, "Why don't I want to do that?"

00:14:54 ◼   ► Because usually there's a reason, and sometimes it's a good reason, and sometimes it's a bad

00:15:00 ◼   ► reason.

00:15:01 ◼   ► But you end up with this funny situation of, at a certain point, like, I don't know, I

00:15:06 ◼   ► don't know.

00:15:07 ◼   ► You either, when you're independent, you either will be in the situation where the thing just

00:15:11 ◼   ► won't get done because there's not like there's someone else on the team who it can get punted

00:15:17 ◼   ► to.

00:15:18 ◼   ► It's like, you're going to do it or you're not.

00:15:23 ◼   ► And so trying to at least understand why you're not doing it.

00:15:26 ◼   ► You know, there are many features, and I mean, I have whole apps that I've sort of, I've

00:15:31 ◼   ► halfheartedly built or I didn't, for some reason, didn't catch my imagination, I guess

00:15:38 ◼   ► you could say.

00:15:39 ◼   ► It's like, if it doesn't have that, can't get over that initial hump, it'll just sit

00:15:44 ◼   ► there and kind of languish.

00:15:45 ◼   ► And even when it might, from a business perspective, be a good idea or, you know, from a just a

00:15:55 ◼   ► utility to the world perspective might be a good thing.

00:15:58 ◼   ► Like there's, if it doesn't catch my attention, I know I won't really be able to do it.

00:16:05 ◼   ► And so it is something that I don't, but I think increasingly, and this is where I was

00:16:09 ◼   ► trying to think, I'm sort of coming around to is, well, while I think that is how I've

00:16:15 ◼   ► acted for a long time now, like I look at my business and I think, you know, like I'm

00:16:23 ◼   ► by allowing myself to do the things that are only the things that I enjoy, I'm probably

00:16:30 ◼   ► hurting the effectiveness of my business, which is, you know, which is problematic in

00:16:37 ◼   ► some ways.

00:16:38 ◼   ► But honestly, like the more fundamental thing that I'm starting to worry about, and I'm

00:16:41 ◼   ► starting to think about a lot more is I'm not getting better at a very fast rate anymore.

00:16:50 ◼   ► But you know, my skills and my abilities, as I go down this or these, you know, as I

00:16:56 ◼   ► keep doing the things that I'm good at and enjoy doing, I get better, I get incrementally

00:17:01 ◼   ► better at doing those things.

00:17:03 ◼   ► But I don't tackle these bigger, harder problems.

00:17:05 ◼   ► And, you know, it's like your example of like a password reset form or an email change form,

00:17:11 ◼   ► like, it's not that that's a hard tech problem to do.

00:17:15 ◼   ► But I know for myself, I have all these features sort of in that vein that I haven't done.

00:17:19 ◼   ► And as a result, like, they're probably disproportionately more difficult to do than they should be,

00:17:27 ◼   ► because it shouldn't be that hard to do a lot some of these things.

00:17:30 ◼   ► They're fairly straightforward.

00:17:31 ◼   ► But if you put them off for long enough, and you know, at a certain point, it actually

00:17:35 ◼   ► does become difficult because you become very rusty at doing those kinds of things.

00:17:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I'll honestly, it would take a lot of rust to be too rusty to make an email

00:17:43 ◼   ► change form.

00:17:44 ◼   ► But sure, you know, and there's a couple things that I want to unpack.

00:17:48 ◼   ► You know, one of them, the getting better at new things and learning new things, that

00:17:51 ◼   ► I think we should come back to.

00:17:53 ◼   ► But also, you know, I think it's important that, you know, as I mentioned, like, one

00:17:57 ◼   ► of the benefits of working for yourself is being able to look at a lot of the things

00:18:03 ◼   ► that the world wants you to do or that you think you're obligated to do.

00:18:08 ◼   ► And on some of those, you can just say no.

00:18:10 ◼   ► And not all of them.

00:18:11 ◼   ► You know, some of them are more important than others.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Some of them, there's more ramifications if you don't do them, you know, that you should

00:18:18 ◼   ► think about.

00:18:19 ◼   ► But, you know, like so many things, I think there's a healthy balance to be found.

00:18:24 ◼   ► You know, you're an indie.

00:18:25 ◼   ► You have the ability to not do stuff you don't want to do.

00:18:31 ◼   ► And you have the ability, as I said earlier, to, you know, take the indulgence of working

00:18:36 ◼   ► on something that might not be worth the time you're putting into it in pure business terms,

00:18:41 ◼   ► or that you might want to do anyway.

00:18:45 ◼   ► It's kind of like eating dessert.

00:18:46 ◼   ► You know, that's why I use the term indulgence, because like, you're allowed to give yourself

00:18:51 ◼   ► that.

00:18:52 ◼   ► You're allowed to do something cool that doesn't make sense from the business, as long as you

00:18:56 ◼   ► don't only do that.

00:18:57 ◼   ► As long as you don't do that out of balance such that your business will suffer and you

00:19:01 ◼   ► won't be able to do this anymore.

00:19:03 ◼   ► And this is a balance that many, many companies and indies have a hard time striking.

00:19:10 ◼   ► You know, everyone has like their pet project they would love to do, or their preferred

00:19:14 ◼   ► way of doing things.

00:19:16 ◼   ► And if it doesn't make sense business-wise to do that, you can still do it sometimes.

00:19:21 ◼   ► You know, you can have fun with things.

00:19:22 ◼   ► You can have side projects.

00:19:24 ◼   ► You can take the indulgence of doing some kind of like crazy, ridiculous thing to make

00:19:29 ◼   ► your app 1% better because you just wanted to do it.

00:19:33 ◼   ► That just can't be all you do.

00:19:34 ◼   ► And similarly, you know, the list of things that like, it's a huge problem if you don't

00:19:38 ◼   ► do them, there are a few things on there that that's true for, but that isn't true for

00:19:42 ◼   ► the whole list.

00:19:43 ◼   ► And as an indie, I feel like you should let yourself have that.

00:19:47 ◼   ► That's part, you know, we as indies, we do a lot of, a lot more, you know, administration

00:19:53 ◼   ► and management of stuff like taxes and accounting and all this stuff.

00:19:56 ◼   ► We take on a lot of burdens there and we also take a huge risk compared to people who work

00:20:01 ◼   ► for other people.

00:20:03 ◼   ► And I think part of the reason we take that and part of the payoff of doing that is this

00:20:07 ◼   ► ability to, you know, miss spend some of our time because we can decide to do that as long

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00:22:03 ◼   ► - All right, so I think it is worth coming back a little bit to what you said earlier

00:22:07 ◼   ► about that you aren't getting better as quickly as you used to or as quickly as you want to.

00:22:13 ◼   ► And that's so, if you do the indie indulgence, I do what I want kind of thing for too long,

00:22:20 ◼   ► then this is a problem.

00:22:21 ◼   ► That you will only do the things that you want to do and you won't get better at other

00:22:26 ◼   ► things.

00:22:27 ◼   ► - I have the same problem in a lot of areas.

00:22:32 ◼   ► For example, things like I haven't really been pressured to learn Swift because why

00:22:36 ◼   ► would I?

00:22:37 ◼   ► As we've discussed, there's some reasons, I'm kind of interested in it a little bit

00:22:41 ◼   ► and everything, but when it comes down to what I actually do day to day, there's nothing

00:22:46 ◼   ► really pushing me to learn it right this second or to convert anything or to write new code

00:22:49 ◼   ► in Swift right now.

00:22:51 ◼   ► There is no big standard.

00:22:53 ◼   ► We also talked about how neither of us are very heavy unit testers.

00:22:56 ◼   ► There's nothing forcing us to become heavy unit testers.

00:23:00 ◼   ► But certain things do bring new topics to us and new skills to us out of necessity.

00:23:07 ◼   ► So things like when the app store economic landscape shifts around, we're forced to

00:23:12 ◼   ► do different types of business models.

00:23:14 ◼   ► We're forced to try things like freemium and ads and things like that.

00:23:19 ◼   ► And so I feel like just being in this ecosystem does push us into a few new things here and

00:23:25 ◼   ► there, but obviously not every kind of thing.

00:23:29 ◼   ► I'm wondering, is there a specific kind of area or example that you feel like you should

00:23:36 ◼   ► be getting better in but just are not being pressured to?

00:23:40 ◼   ► I think the hardest thing about that question is that it falls a lot in the...

00:23:47 ◼   ► It's an unknown loss.

00:23:51 ◼   ► It's hard for me to know exactly if there's a particular area where I'm deficient because

00:23:57 ◼   ► in some ways by the very nature of it being a deficiency, being an area that I'm not exposed

00:24:01 ◼   ► to, being something that I'm not forcing myself to undertake, I don't understand what I'm

00:24:10 ◼   ► missing out on.

00:24:12 ◼   ► And so it's tricky.

00:24:13 ◼   ► But I think about the situations where I used to be really scared about dealing with low-level

00:24:22 ◼   ► core graphics stuff.

00:24:25 ◼   ► That was an area, like doing animations or things like that, that I used to think were

00:24:29 ◼   ► really...

00:24:30 ◼   ► It was just this little black box that I never opened up, that it was just terrifying to

00:24:34 ◼   ► me.

00:24:35 ◼   ► And more recently, I've gotten used to that.

00:24:41 ◼   ► And in Activity++ was an area where I hit this wall where I was trying to make this

00:24:45 ◼   ► animation, and all of a sudden it's like, the only way I'm going to be able to do this

00:24:49 ◼   ► is if I drop down a level.

00:24:52 ◼   ► And so it's like, well, I really liked this thought I had in my mind for what the animation

00:24:57 ◼   ► would look like.

00:24:58 ◼   ► And so I dove in and I really learned all this crazy stuff and got it to work.

00:25:04 ◼   ► And now I have this whole other toolset that I can... as I'm looking at problems in my

00:25:12 ◼   ► other apps or in new apps, I have this whole toolset that I just completely didn't have

00:25:16 ◼   ► before, and these capabilities that I didn't even...

00:25:19 ◼   ► I intellectually knew probably existed, but I didn't really understand what that meant.

00:25:25 ◼   ► And I think that experience that you can intellectually know that something is possible, but until

00:25:34 ◼   ► you've actually done it, it can be really... you don't really know what you're missing

00:25:38 ◼   ► out on.

00:25:39 ◼   ► And I think the thing that I'm trying to sort of chasten myself with in this experience,

00:25:45 ◼   ► or in this thought process that I've been having recently, is the "I don't know what

00:25:49 ◼   ► all those things are that I'm missing, but I know that they exist."

00:25:55 ◼   ► And I want to try and motivate myself to tackle problems that are difficult so that I can

00:26:02 ◼   ► discover what those things are.

00:26:05 ◼   ► Because the things that I do understand, the things that I have a great handle on, are

00:26:10 ◼   ► the things that are easier, or the things that came more naturally to me.

00:26:13 ◼   ► Another area that I think is something that I'm trying to think about more is having a

00:26:17 ◼   ► better understanding around graphic design.

00:26:22 ◼   ► Not necessarily in terms of app design, but in terms of actual art type of things, and

00:26:28 ◼   ► having a better sense of that.

00:26:29 ◼   ► Where right now, it's this big scary thing that I could never do that.

00:26:34 ◼   ► But I guess history has shown me that all these things that I say, "Oh, I could never

00:26:38 ◼   ► do that," are probably just things that I haven't tried and applied myself to.

00:26:44 ◼   ► And it's an interesting reminder that the skills that I have now, at some point, probably

00:26:51 ◼   ► look like these other things look to me now do.

00:26:55 ◼   ► Yeah, that's fair.

00:26:56 ◼   ► But I think also the life of an indie is, it's broad.

00:27:03 ◼   ► I think graphic design is a good example, because there are lots of things, like deep,

00:27:08 ◼   ► low-level programming things that we won't need to know, or shouldn't know, because we

00:27:14 ◼   ► have to be a little more broad.

00:27:15 ◼   ► And we have to also know about things like accounting and business set up to some minor

00:27:22 ◼   ► degree and things like graphic design and marketing.

00:27:25 ◼   ► There is so much out there that we need to know that you might have already picked up

00:27:30 ◼   ► lots of these things along the way, but you might not be giving yourself credit for them.

00:27:35 ◼   ► It sounds like certain things that you perceive as these big walls that are intimidating to

00:27:40 ◼   ► you in some way, that those things count in professional development or betterment, but

00:27:46 ◼   ► that the things that you pick up along the way of being an independent person and doing

00:27:51 ◼   ► things the way that you do them, especially so thoroughly and analytically, you've built

00:27:56 ◼   ► and picked up lots of skills along the way in that area that you probably don't even,

00:28:02 ◼   ► you probably just did it so gradually or so automatically, or did it without thinking

00:28:07 ◼   ► too much about how you were bettering yourself during that time, that you weren't even giving

00:28:11 ◼   ► yourself credit.

00:28:12 ◼   ► But that all counts.

00:28:13 ◼   ► Like, you were getting better.

00:28:15 ◼   ► You've been getting better at lots of things over time that just might not be low-level

00:28:18 ◼   ► APIs.

00:28:19 ◼   ► Sure.

00:28:20 ◼   ► I think you're probably true that I'm being too hard on myself with this thought process.

00:28:26 ◼   ► But yeah, I think maybe the final takeaway to think about this is just, I think it is

00:28:32 ◼   ► probably a good thing to be conscious of how we're approaching difficult problems, to see

00:28:39 ◼   ► if we're not doing them or we're not approaching them for the right reasons.

00:28:44 ◼   ► Because fair enough, I'm never going to be as good of an icon designer as someone like

00:28:48 ◼   ► Louis Mantia.

00:28:51 ◼   ► Very few people ever will.

00:28:52 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:28:53 ◼   ► And so it's not like my goal is to do that.

00:28:56 ◼   ► It's not that I'm trying to be everything and to accomplish all of, like, to do everything

00:29:01 ◼   ► on my own.

00:29:03 ◼   ► But just because I can't get to that end, it's probably still good for me to look at

00:29:08 ◼   ► something and say, "Well, what could I do?

00:29:10 ◼   ► What could I learn?

00:29:11 ◼   ► What's one area that I can try and solve a difficult problem and by doing so, make

00:29:17 ◼   ► myself better?"

00:29:19 ◼   ► And that is almost certainly going to be a productive exercise.

00:29:22 ◼   ► And with that, we're out of time this week.

00:29:24 ◼   ► Thank you everybody for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

00:29:27 ◼   ► Bye.

00:29:27 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]