Moving On
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Yesterday, Scribd submitted the app I've been working on for the last 6 months. It's been really great working with everyone. It was also my last day at Scribd. Now that the project is done, I'm moving on to something else.
Nothing! Taking some time off to rest after working crazy hours to finish the project. I have a pretty exciting contract gig I'll be starting soon that will last for a few months that will be a lot of fun. I have a few interviews at some pretty cool places, but I'm not in a hurry to get a real job again.
Sigh, yes. This will be the third time I have moved to being a full-time contractor. Yes, I hated it in the past. Yes, I've said that I won't hate it this time around before. Yes, I probably will hate it in a few months :) Anyway, I'm excited. I want to focus on my own projects more this time around.
Four Years
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I choose not to attend college. During my senior year of high school, I was co-oping (half day at school finishing my required classes and a half day at work). When I graduated in 2007 (I hope I just made you feel old) I transitioned to a full time salary employee. I always thought that getting a salary job with benefits was the entire point of going to college, but I enrolled anyway.
As starting college approached, I soon realized I would have to spend almost all of my free time driving from work to school, sitting in classes, and doing homework. I was totally dreading this. I wasn't a good student in high school and didn't want any part of the busy work, writing papers, and all of that nonsense.
My mother really wanted me to go because neither of my parents went, so I said I'd stick it out and go. A few months later, I got a job offer from LifeChurch.tv in Oklahoma City and decided to take it. Obviously, I would have to drop out of the University of Louisville where I was enrolled since I would be moving away. Trying to keep my promise to my mom, I enrolled in Phoenix.edu.
Custom Cloud App Viso
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If you haven't heard of Cloud App, you must be living under a rock or something else that shields you from awesome. It's a fantastic service. You must check it out.
Anyway, they've done some really cool stuff. The little app that servers your drops is written in Sinatra and open-source on GitHub. Awesome, right?! I forked and customized a bit.
Checkout my fork. It's super simple, faster, and very HTML5-y. Before it included jQuery, some other Javascript, lots of CSS, etc. Now it's just one stylesheet and 2-3 images. I was proud.
Clean Up Your Project
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Many of the apps I work on are usually 100% custom. There is rarely any system UI components visible to the user. Styling the crap out of apps like this makes for tons of images in my iOS projects to get everything the way the designer wants. I'm starting to drawRect: stuff more these days because it makes it easier to reuse, but anyway.
There are literally hundreds of images in the Scribd app I've been working on. Designers changing their mind plus everything custom leaves a lot of images behind that are no longer used. Our application was starting to be several megs and a lot of it was unused images. So... being the programmer I am, I wrote a script.
It basically searches all of your source files for references for [UIImage imageWithName:@"image_name_here"]. Then it looks at all of the images on disk and removes any you didn't reference. I setup a whitelist for icons and other images I don't reference directly. You might need to tweak the paths a bit to work for your setup.
Typical Sam
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National Geographic released a video about the typical human. It's really interesting. You should watch it.
I was curious how typical I am. Here's the typical traits and how I line up:
- Right handed: Yep
- Makes less than $12,000 a year: Nope
- Owns a cell phone: Yep
- Doesn't have a bank account: Nope
- Male: Yep
- 28 years old: Nope
- Chinese: Nope