About

In 2009 I launched this blog as an outlet to talk about what it was like to build iPhone apps during the beginnings of the Apple App Store. Those were heady times and people where eager to learn how to not only code apps but also how to market and sell them on the App Store.

During that time period I wrote lots of "how to" articles about coding apps in Objective-C. At some point I wrapped up everything I learned into an eBook that was available on this site. Eventually, this became a course that I would teach in person and online with video chats.

My main audience in those years were iPhone super-users who wanted to hack their own phones and create apps as a hobby. Some people wanted to start a business with apps or they simply wanted to share their work with friends.

For me personally, this blog served as a entry to publishing. Becoming a writer had been a bucket list item of mine since I was a kid. Writing posts on this blog was my first writing experience where I had an audience that I could engage with. Without the work I did here in 2009 I never would have started a relationship with Apress and published real-life books like Learn RStudio IDE or Objective-C Recipes.

Once my business started to wane in 2014 and I needed to return to the 9-5 work world I let this site lapse. Changes to the google algorithm and my increasingly inconsistant posting schedule caused a loss in traffic. With my new responsibilities I let go of the domain. This was something I always regretted. So, when the opportunity to reclaim this blog came in May I jumped into a bidding war to get it back. That is where I am finding myself today.

I'm not sure where I will take this blog in the future. The first thing is to get back as much of my old content as I can. Writing about iPhone apps in 2024 is more tricky than it was 10 years ago. For one thing, Apple has had time to flesh out their own resources for new developers so the need for the type of content I wrote in 2009 is not as strongly felt. And frankly, what worked in 2009-2014 to build apps will not work well today. We have better tools and even a better programming language.

But, I have some ideas. After 10 years working in data science adjacent roles I have lost some of the Xcode muscle memory I once had. I have some relearning to do. Something I am thinking of is building a new app from scratch while relearning Swift and the new best practices for coding apps. I've learned a lot about programming over the last ten years that I think would be interesting share as I go through this process. I also will probably republish my original ebook and boot camp content to the extent where it makes sense.

What I really hope to accomplish with this blog is to make it a love letter to coding and technology. Coding for fun is a great way to recharge from what can be a tedious 9-5 worklife. It's a good way to broaden skills and otherwise keep your mind fresh. And even though the days of making easy money on the App Store are over, the craft of coding is still fun and valuable and coding for the iPhone is the most fun I've had in technology in my 25 year career.