geeko

SEEKING WORK, located in Stuttgart, Germany.

I develop and design iOS apps.

Email: dinh@mocava.de | twitter: @vpdn

I'm currently working as a freelance iOS dev in a scrum team on moovel[1]. I'll be available for remote contract work starting june.

Samples:

[1] moovel (dev): http://www.daimler.com/technology-and-innovation/mobility-co...

[2] Converter app (dev & design), roughly 700k downloads: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/converter/id423521445?mt=8

[3] Timetracking App (design): http://d.pr/i/zGZW

I hope the iPad will also turn into a music instrument. Something in the direction of the reactable [1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgy1S8qymx0

It's easy to dismiss things. It's much harder to try to imagine the possibilities and build things.

Reminds me of _why's quote:

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

" Watch how they have memorized all the shortcuts and quirks of their custom line-of-business apps. You'll discover a class of users who want power and control, not simplicity and ease-of-use."

Doesn't "quirks" already imply that it's non-optimal? Shouldn't we think of applications and user interfaces which don't make someone remembering all shortcuts a "professional"? As stated by others before, simplicity and ease of use aren't strongly correlated to power and control.

Are you still making 1$ off your site today?

Ok, seems like I'm the only one with googlelitis.

Worse if down the road, you find yourself not being able to build the stuff you'd like to build.

Finding a job is hard. Finding your passion is much harder.

What you're saying is similar to what I am trying to do:

Take up projects which are 60% stuff you know how to do and 40% things you'd like to learn (the numbers are just made up, but you get the point). Even better, get paid for learning (e.g. competition with prizes or learning in a corporate environment)

Totally agree on this. I'm on it at this very moment :)

And I'm telling you, even then, convincing managers is not easier than convincing any other investor.

In consulting, it's usually not your employer that pushes you. It's your clients. In a startup, it's either your investors or your customer (hopefully). Either way, there's always forces that want you to execute instead of learn. There's no direct visible gain from you learning. It's like climate change. It's important, but noone in power cares.

I totally agree with your long term statement. And I do also agree with you on the fact that just learning without execution renders your learning useless.

The thing is, how do you juggle between these two extremes? @imp notes below:

"I let my own ambitions determine which zone I'm in, and they last from a couple weeks to months."

The cycle seems to come naturally to him. For others like @Ixiaus it takes more conscious effort (I assume, since he quit his job to be able to learn the things which matter to him).

Are you doing anything to nurture these two extremes? Or do they just come naturally to you?

Your comment reminds me of a discussion I had with my cofounder long time ago (yes I have tried the startup path multiple times). We were discussing how this pattern of wildness, of strong desire to produce things follows an almost relaxing, reflecting period. The discussion arose while we were learning about the coding and refactoring cycle during the extreme programming days in Karlsruhe, Germany where I used to study.

@Ixiaus, are you on twitter? Would love to continue reading how you're doing. Your homepage link works as well of course.

Feel free to drop me an email (vp[at]dinhmail.de) when you're traveling to Germany. Beers on me :-)

It sounds easy to do so. Too often however, I find myself reading how-tos and copy-pasting tutorials while building stuff...and forgetting everything after I finished.

I have the feeling that google has significantly changed the way I store things in my head (for the better or worse). Instead of remembering how things are done and why so, I at best save a mental hyperlink to the information or worse, I just rely on google to be available and give me the tutorial/code snippet I need at that very moment (and again forgetting all afterwards).

Being forced to reproduce what you've learned at least once without having google is actually useful (at least for the way my brain works).

Here's haystack.com couple of years back: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://haystack.com

I wonder how much they paid for the domain?

"More than half of fliers report some level of anxiety before boarding a plane, and 5% of the population refuses to fly at all."

Where does this data come from?

...even if you only weight 80 pounds.

You might be interested in Tony's startup2startup talk: http://startup2startup.com/2009/03/27/tony-hsieh-zappos-in-t...

It might just be a mistake on apple's side. They have and will probably continue to revoke apps which have previously been accepted to the App Store.

I wonder how they measure happiness in those trials. Is there some kind of 'Happy Unit' metric to measure happiness?

I wonder who one feels like as a CEO if customers wish you so much well (assuming the people at Scribd actually read things like this).

The Leaderboard can be found here:

http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard

Is there a direct link to the pdf?

From your page: "Mark Bao (formerly Steven Bao)"

Interesting intro :)

"If this, or any other test says your site is slow from a particular location on the net, what can you possibly do about it"

Basically it nails down to reducing the number requests and the roundtrip time per request (aka latency).

- Use a CDN to reduce latency (e.g. cachefly, cloudfront) - Outsource some javascript libraries (e.g. jquery) to google's CDN - Move servers closer to customers.

I don't want to sound offensive, but do wonder what is the purpose of this exercise? Is there any problem this project is solving? Or is it 'just' for educational purpose?

How about googling for it first before posting:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

Looking forward to teaching my kid this kind of stuff as well. But it will take about another 15 years until he turns 11.

I wonder how to conduct such why meetings without demoralizing people? I can imagine people being more worried about being mentioned in those meetings than they worry about customer satisfaction. Of course one could always hide the problem beneath 'you have to build the right corporate culture'.

Also, what size does a problem need to have to result in such a meeting? Every argument with your colleagues? Every customer related problem? Every technical problem?

"In fact, at IMVU, we did exactly that. We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently."

This happens in our corporation as well, although in a much more informal way. It goes more like this: There's an annoyance, let's solve it. As the article says, the investments are gradual and there's not much time required to fix the little problems. One at a time.

I must say I haven't hated something with such great passion as I hate scribd and similar services. The only reason why I still end up on scribd.com is because some idiotic friend is not able to link the direct source for the document in question.

I absolutely don't get it how such a service adds value to the web. It's great for scribd to have 60 million readers. I am one of them. Why? Because I'm freaking forced to sign up to download a pdf.

"A social publishing company that aims to liberate the written word by democratizing the publishing process for everyday people". - Sounds great. Could you please provide the link?

It's quite normal to have people not believing in you or your idea. Jeff Bezos wasn't able to pitch the online book store, google was turned down by yahoo and for me more tangible, my professor Goetz Werner, was turned down by his former boss and consequently started his dm drugstore chain. It's now a multibillion dollar business for him. He has since then passed on daily operations and is now teaching entrepreneurship at our uni (Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany).

Just like ideas, people evolve. The trick is to not feel too depressed about rejection. Practising helps :)