3 Weeks
I’ve been on my own for three weeks now, and I’m definitely enjoying it. I know that one of the general issues with self-employment is whether one can stay motivated without the external structure imposed by The Man. Fortunately I seem to have no problem with this — I’ve been coding at top speed. Mostly I work in the detached office, which is now clean and cozy, but sometimes I hang out on the couch in the living room. I have some Things running … they don’t look like much yet, but that’s because they’re infrastructure. This stuff ends up being harder than it seems it ought to, but I remind myself that if it weren’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing. And also: if it’s hard for me, it’s also probably hard for anyone else to do, which means less competition. ;-)
I’d like to thank everyone for their encouraging & thoughtful comments on my “Gone Indie” post. So: “Thanks!”. I just now turned off further comments on that post, because it’s been up a few weeks and the page is getting rather long.
I plan to write a few posts about what I’m working on, at a high level. I just don’t feel quite ready yet, mostly because right now my mind is more on how to make things work than on how to explain them. But the explaining is important too.
For now I’ll just teasingly post a cryptic list of things I’ve been working with:
BEEP, Bonjour, CDSA, CMS, FSEvents, Keychain, Mercurial, Mnemonic encoding, NAT Port Mapping, NSCollectionView, SSL/TLS, X.509, Vortex.
January 24th, 2008 at 8:41 PM
Dear Jens:
About Gone Indie…
Thanks for this history.
I like a single Mac- consumer (macaddict really), I can feel those changes in corporate behavior from Apple.
I can see like ¨The Computer for rest of us¨ is gone.
The ¨Think Diffent¨ is gone too.
It is a pity!
But Tanks for all your work in Apple for Us.
God Bless you, Congratulation and Good Luck for comming times.
I going to wait for your killer-apps.
And Sorry for my english (I’m from Buenos Aires, Argentina).
Good Life, Jens.
Korby! from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
January 24th, 2008 at 8:57 PM
Hey jens,
I too am an indie mac coder. I love cocoa.
I have a project i started on 13th Feb 2004, but havent looked at for 2 years (full time work precludes late night coding) until recently, when i finally got it running under Leopard.
Good luck and remember… they (Phil, Jonny and Steve) may just come knockin’ on YOUR door one day.
boom Jonno
January 24th, 2008 at 9:08 PM
Mmmm…. Mercurial. My new favorite SCM. I loved Subversion, but it’s like going to college and realizing your high school girlfriend was just the warm up act.
I can’t wait to see what you’ve got cooking!
January 24th, 2008 at 11:17 PM
Hey Jens, glad you have been able to find something to be passionate about again. I was pretty bored my last year at Apple, and know what a drain on productivity something you find unexciting can be. For me, Pages rev3 was a bore after working on much more new and exciting technologies in the Server group for years.
Enjoy your new found freedom. I look forward to using your and other recent Apple grads upcoming applications.
January 24th, 2008 at 11:25 PM
@Aaron — If it’s any consolation, I love Pages 3. It’s really become an excellent word processor, and I’ve stopped feeling nostalgic for Word 4.0.
January 25th, 2008 at 2:54 AM
I’m a little late to the party but still a big welcome Jens, it’s a big world out here :)
January 25th, 2008 at 8:51 AM
Jens, add another one to welcome you to the world of freedom and the space for you to stretch your expansive mind full of ideas. I congratulate you on your big step. I’m also very excited to see what goodies you create. Might I ask how will you market your “stuff” once you complete them? I ask because whatever you’re working on sounds terribly exciting and I’m sure a lot of Mac users would love to see, use, enjoy your creations. I also must agree with with many expressed opinions that not much interesting software has come out of Apple for a long while. So it’s up to the Indies to fill in those very large gaps.
Good luck! ;-)
January 25th, 2008 at 11:54 AM
@Robocub — Haven’t thought about marketing, other than the obvious things like (a) make a website, (b) register app with VersionTracker and MacUpdate, (c) email announcement to Mac news sites, (d) blog about it.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:57 AM
What are you using for BEEP? I’ve always been annoyed when I’ve tried to build the beepcore-c library on Mac OS X because its
configurescript finds the version oflibsasl.dylibin/usr/lib, which Apple doesn’t ship headers for.Sure the script could be better in how it detects what libraries to use, but it’d be nice if the SASL API was actually supported. (And not just because it came out of the Cyrus project at CMU when I was in that group…)
January 26th, 2008 at 7:09 AM
You can see by the number of comments you’ve received that the Internet is the main tool for marketing now, so I think you’ll be able to do this yourself. Your post about leaving Apple was picked up by many sites and I read about it on another site yesterday. So even though it’s old news to you, it’s still being circulated on the Internet and reaching new eyes. And, of course, it has worldwide reach.
You always were self motivated and always had unique, superb, vision as well as the ability to execute it. I can’t wait to see the wondrous things you’re going to do.
I don’t think you need my help but I’m happy to help in any way.
(Everyone probably knows how to do this, but I never bothered with it; going to the original sites regularly… is there a help page somewhere about how to turn on RSS feeds, I don’t know where I’d be receiving them or how to get it going.)
January 26th, 2008 at 10:05 AM
@chanson — The Vortex I mentioned is a newish C BEEP implementation. I was able to get it to build & run on Leopard without too much trouble. A few source changes were required, which they’ve incorporated into the latest revisions in SVN. I have an Xcode project I haven’t submitted yet; no rocket science, there are just a few configuration flags you have to set in the Xcode preprocessor options.
Actually, since you mention SASL, I didn’t get that part of Vortex to work, but there’s a preprocessor flag to disable it.
January 26th, 2008 at 7:43 PM
Go Jens! It’s good to see you go Indie. Stick with it; you’ll do fine.
Steve Friedrich (from the old, old, old days - MacApp 3, AppleEvents, AppleScript).
January 26th, 2008 at 8:15 PM
Blessings Jens,
I hope you do well with your projects AND find a market for them. Motivation and Money are the hardest things to get I found - after spending 15 years of week-ends and short holidays trying to build my killer NeXT/Mac app to no avail. Its really good you are full time but financial backing takes a load off the mind.
I too am an ‘Indie’ developer but with the benefit of financial backing from an entrepreneur (not sure if this counts as truly indie though). After delivering our mandated business app, I hope to move into consumer Mac apps. Hopefully this time I’ll get there with the full time nature and “spurring on” one gets from peers.
I left corporate IT 2 years ago after being frustrated with politics and mediocre people who persecute talent to save their own face. I spent a year in China lecturing Java and English just to break away from all the BS in the annoying money grubbing commercial world and refresh my spirit. Are there any others out there who share this experience?
I’ve been developing for Java on a Mac for a year now. I’m new to the blogging thing but I’m thinking of writing some articles for new indie developers making the transition (experiences & advice etc) or even technical articles for all creative developers who share a passion for invention, stay tuned…
Keith
Melbourne, Australia