New season
Hi, I’m Chris Hulbert. I occasionally blog about life, contracting, and apps. If you’re reading this, you probably find it interesting, or you never realised there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom ;)
Well, it’s time for a new season! I walked out the door at work at 5(ish….) today, out of the old season. Here’s a rundown of the old season:
Work
I’ve been working at News Corp for the last year. It’s been interesting, met lots of great people. The project had it’s ups and downs, like any. It’s about to ship, and my contract expired, so time to move on.
Unfortunately, can’t really blog about the dayjob much. One piece of wisdom I learned today that can be shared is this: Become buddies with your boss’s boss’s boss, and keep him/her informed with what’s going on in the project! They need eyes on the ground, and you’d be doing them a great service if you are those eyes for them.
Side projects
I’ve been working on an iPad app in my spare time called ‘Divine Bible’. It’s a combination of 260 gorgeous landscape photos and the text of the New Testament. You can see it on the app store here: Divine Bible
In the past, when I’ve made apps, I’ve written about how they’ve performed to inspire people to try too. Well, this was my favourite app to date, and it basically fell flat on its face in less than a week. There seems to be a lot of ‘woe to the indie developers in todays app store’ going on around the blogs lately - I can confirm this is true. Waste of time. I cannot even give the app away for free!
If anyone has any good ideas for how to market my app… let me know :)
So, in some ways, that’s an end of a season too: The end of me investing time into app store apps as side projects. And I don’t think i’m the only one out there doing similarly. And it’s a shame too - the app store just isn’t the same without the crafted-with-love indie apps any more. Oh well, Apple doesn’t seem to care. I guess they’re too busy counting their billions.
Next season
So what’s in store for the next season? Well, I’ll be starting next week at my next contract, at Dimmi, making their next iOS app. Exciting stuff, certainly a change of pace from working in a big corporate.
As for side projects, I’m toying with the idea of getting back into brainstorming a SaaS product. I have to learn how to do server stuff again though. I’m thinking of using Golang + Revel, I simply cannot wrap my head around Rails any more - it’s just too big now. I just need to find a market and find some ideas for what to build now. I was thinking something in the construction industry, so I can partner with my brother-in-law.
Please get in touch with an email, say hi!
Thanks for reading! And if you want to get in touch, I'd love to hear from you: chris.hulbert at gmail.
Chris Hulbert
(Comp Sci, Hons - UTS)
Software Developer (Freelancer / Contractor) in Australia.
I have worked at places such as Google, Cochlear, Assembly Payments, News Corp, Fox Sports, NineMSN, FetchTV, Coles, Woolworths, Trust Bank, and Westpac, among others. If you're looking for help developing an iOS app, drop me a line!
Get in touch:
[email protected]
github.com/chrishulbert
linkedin
