WEEK 7: Eventful Happenings

I am not used to this level of running around.

It is no bad complaint to be made, but to say this last week was busy would be a gross underestimation. I attended 3 tech & business events, a couple of meetings, 1 educational talk and an attempted visit to the Redwind offices for their open office evening, which pretty much ended in disaster.

I haven't been so busy since I actually had a job.

Dublin Beta

Dublin Beta was awesome, I know for a fact that people were still talking about it days after the event. Dublin Beta, for the uninitiated, is basically a demo day cum networking event where startups demo their wares to a receptive audience and ultimately hope to be voted on by them for the bragging rights of "Winner of Dublin Beta 2012". Despite the shoulder to shoulder nature of the event, or maybe because of it, the atmosphere was very receptive to the general vibe of networking with your peers, something I didn't feel so much about the Startup Summit.

Games Ireland Gathering

The Games Ireland Gathering was an event hosted in the Gibson Hotel beside The Point and just down the road from my old college, The National College of Ireland. It was a pretty serious affair in the sense that, in my mind at least, it was as important as the Dublin Web Summit is to the web, The Games Ireland Gathering was to the game development industries.

Start Summit

The Start Summit was an event put together by the organisers of the Dublin Web Summit as a way to get investors, developers, entrepreneurs and the like to network while the top 3 startups which were voted on its website demoed their wares. I feel I must be very critical of this; the impression given perhaps is that you are getting the creme de la creme, and perhaps by extension that you'll get to see some interesting demos or at least pitches. I feel neither happened. The demo area was relegated to one side of the room, which due to high turnout was incredibly annoying/frustrating to traverse.

Dublin Beta had this same problem but due to it being a smaller event in quantity of people and venue size, their was enough of a churn going that you could make your way from one group to another pretty easily. At the Start Summit I did not find to to be the case at all. Perhaps this was due in part to the venue changing last minute due excess numbers of attendees, but in any case, it felt to me like any concept of seeing a demo was negated by the desire to not have to barge past 50 people with pints in their hands, talking amongst themselves.

Being at the back of the room didn't lend itself well to hearing companies pitches, so I really cannot comment on that, since in all honesty I can't say I heard any of it from where I was sitting. One could argue that such is the result of a last minute reshuffle to a new venue, but I would say that when you pay a ticket price to hear pitches and see demos, the success of the sale should not deteriorate the value of said ticket.

The food was awesome though, and almost makes up for the other failures... almost.

Couple of meetings

I met up with a couple of folk this week also, just to discuss business ideas, potential partnerships etc. Nothing I want to get into too much detail here, but which were definitely well worth doing.

Tog Introduction to Security

Dublin's hacker's space in residence, Tog held an introductory talk on Information Security. This topic is far from new to me, so one might reasonable ask why I'd bother myself with an introductory talk. My answer is quite simply that Tog has competed and won half of the HackEire hacking competitions run by IRIS every year. I was sure there was room for something to learn, and of course there was.

If you have never been to Tog, I cannot recommend them highly enough. Particularly if your into hacking, lock picking, crafts, wearable electronics, 3D printing or any other of a myriad of subjects that get covered or experienced frequently.

Redwind Open Office (attempted)

Well this was pretty much a disaster, for me at least. Redwind is a Dublin based developer of iOS Apps and previous recipient of Enterprise Ireland's Internet & Gaming fund (alongside my ex-employer Decisions For Heroes). Having recently moved into a new office in drumcondra they were to open their doors for people to come along and see their new offices, say hi, have a few beers later in the pub down stairs etc.

Unfortunately, when Zombie and I arrived, there was no sign of life. The lights appeared off from the outside, there was no response to the 3 or 4 presses of the door bell and no bodies of note in the pub down stairs to speak of. So after waiting for 5-10 minutes for some sign of life, myself and Zombie headed home. Which was a disappointing and kind of annoying truth be told, but shit happens.

Next week on LOST...

Hugo has a coronary bypass, while Jack has a nervous breakdown after hearing voices tell him that none of this will ever make any god damned sense. Ever.

Next week is thus far planned to be far less action packed, but we shall see how things progress. I am seriously considering just getting The Lean Startup on audio book at this rate, at least I can "read" it while doing other stuff that doesn't require use of my eyes (notably: programming). I guess that means I'd have to deal with Audible's disgusting native apps again. Ugh. Worst UX ever. If I were a speed reader, this wouldn't be a problem. Do speedos help?

Next week I'll find out the result of the application(s) for Enterprise Ireland's Competitive Start Fund, which I am trying not to hold out too much hope for since the competition is high and I got the impression from EI's application process that they are still keeping one foot stuck in an older mindset when it comes to business plans etc. (which is contrasted strongly by the NDRC which seems to love Lean Startup etc.)

On Saturday will be the Dublin Game Craft, which I actually spent some of yesterday preparing for. It's been altogether too long since I used Unity in any serious context, so I and Zombie got to grips again with Unity after its big overhaul to version 3.5. I finally got around to making use of 2D Toolkit too, which although I had to buy Glyph Designer to get fonts imported, works a dream at providing just enough of the necessary tools to get 2D working without stepping on your toes and telling you there is one perfect way of doing things (are you hearing me Apple??).

There will also be the Dublin Twitter Teatime on Thursday, which should be interesting. Not least because it won't happen until its too late in the evening to legitimately call it tea-time, but we can forgive them that much at least.

Last but not least, a photo gallery of Mr. Zombie's Adventures:

Week 6: Tangible Assets

This past week was pretty exceptional, not least because I'm finally starting to get into a good rythm, but also because I had two applications to Enterprise Ireland's Competitive Start Fund completed and submitted on time (co-founder on one, founder/promoter on another), I viewed two potential offices (one locally, one near Google) and attended two tech events: Windows Phone Camp and Lean Startup Dublin. 

• I'm still only at the ~20% mark of The Lean Startup, but time allowing I will endeavour to finish as much as I can in the next week or so.


• I have started work on a side project for improved iOS mapping. There's a whole story behind it but the gist is that I've always found the default mapping application on iOS to be sub-par for what I need, which really isn't all that much truth be told.


• I finally made the switch to using iWork for all my documents, pretty much. I used to use Microsoft Office for Mac but it always had stability problems for me and it still never completely elimated the question of whether the documents created on a Mac were 100% readable on Windows. Google Docs is fantastic for what it is but it's far too provincial, and I dont like the UI one bit. So my workflow is now Pages, Numbers and Keynote on all iOS devices and Mac. 


• Evernote is still going strong, I haven't had a single corrupt note on it since I started using it, thankfully. Although the full screen view is a bit silly (where do I select which notepad I'm using?!), but other than that it's been working very well these past few weeks.


• The process of writing one business plan while helping to write another was an experience all of its own. I still find it rather perplexing why Enterprise Ireland should request 1-3 year financial projections for startup companies, when knowing full well that if such projections could be made it would almost by definition define them as not startups. A startup, in my estimation and understanding, is only really a startup when the market is uncertain or untapped. To make financial projections on such a market is to count your dinosaurs before they're chickens. That analogy really doesn't work so well, but you get my point - projecting the financial turnover of a company yet to achieve any customers, or yet to define a market, is pretty silly if you ask me. The application process was also slightly mired by the fact that the website used for the applications was a little, er, "buggy":
  • With a 30 minute timeout, you can easily spend your time typing eloquent responses to questions and then have all that wiped out because the timer expired. 
  
  
  • The site crashed frequently when pasting text from Pages documents. I often had to paste them directly into TextEdit and copy & paste that into the form just to prevent it bugging out or complaing about something.
  
  
  • I had my entire application wiped at least once, with the exception of a few checkboxes etc. all input forms were wiped. Luckily I had saved all my responses into a Pages document, but if someone who had not thought of doing so had the same experience, it could be soul crushing. certainly at the 11th hour.
  
  
  • The form had frequent bugs/errors in calculating the total number of characters. Quite often I had to trim my text simply because it couldn't count correctly. One side of the form would say 10 characters remaining, while the other would say you exceeded it by 25, or other similarly arbitrary numbers.


• Lean Startup Dublin is a cool group, with a lot of like-minded people but I'm not sure how often I'll be going to its events. I can see the advantage of meeting up with people for networking, chatting, and just going through the various problems/solutions people have had but... I find it a stretch to be asked to pay between 100 and 300 for "training" events where authors of books or authorised speakers of such, essentially guide you through the knowledge you are already afforded by owning such materials. If I were representing an organisation with the resources to pay ~300Euro for a day's training, sure it would be fine, but this group is aimed at startup's - who almost my definition are lean on cash. So, I don't know, but we'll see how it plays out.


• Windows Phone Camp was an interesting experience. I spent most my time raging that my laptop was so slow - being the laptop I use for all things Windows, it's not exactly what one would call current. In the end, and on reflection, I probably had more of an app completed than most people seemed to have had. But in any case, I had zero interest in showing off a half finished prototype of a prototype.. even for a sexy smart phone. As a development experience Windows Phone 7 is actually pretty nice, you can get a really fully developed understanding of how the UI is put together by being able to manually edit the XAML for the User Interface. Something similar for iOS would be well recieved.

Offices

I'll leave you with some photos I took of the offices I viewed earlier in the week:

Week 5: Speedy Progress

This past week has been a hustle and bustle of activity. 

1. I have spent the majority of the past week working on and developing a business plan and an application to Enterprise Ireland's Competetive Start Fund. Managing to get all the major questions ahead of time, I've been working through them incrementally and solving some problems along the way. Ironically, this process has me feeling more than anything that I might not just yet want or need outside help. Whilst a 50K cash injection would be nice, and the strings the come with it aren't altogether too burdensome, there are aspects of the process which I would feel much happier about if I had a minimal viable product (to quote The Lean Startup). Additionally, giving away 10% of an idea for 50K (valuing it at 500,000 total) seems decent in theory, but ideas are by definition worthless. It is solely in the execution of an idea where value is generated, so to sell 10% of future value generation before any understanding of what that value may represent, seems to me to be jumping the gun.


2. I went to GTUG at Google Ireland on Tuesday, you've really got to love how Google supports the tech community. Free food and drink doesn't hurt either! It was a decent talk, not much learned from the Swrve talk as it was all stuff I was quite aware of previously, though there were a few stats drops that I would like to check up on (70% of iOS sales are in-app-purchases?). The semantic web discussion was more interesting for me, despite the basic idea seemingly being an old one, it's still interesting stuff.


3. More work continues on the mobile app, but it's now being relegated to 1-2 days per week maximum so that I can focus on other projects without it taking full control of my time.


4. Wednesday was an entire wash-out, I felt to weak to do anything at all. I'm not sure what the cause was, but I felt dreadful all day: slow breathing, weakness throughout my body, very lethargic. I dont know, it's very easy for me to go without food or sleep without realising it, and I've felt very tired in general since I sorted out my sleep pattern around last Thursday. It's quite possible that my body is so used to irregular hours and irregular sleep that now I'm starting to get into a proper schdule, I'm begining to run on fumes when I dont realise it. Either way, we'll see if it continues into next week.


5. I loathe to admit it, but I bought a Kindle and it has really improved on my reading. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with the Kindle, its a wonderful device. But for my own ego or whatever, I would've liked to get to grips with physical books more, but the simple ease of use of having any book I want in my pocket while I'm waiting on a train or between moments is quite liberating. I should be finished The Lean Startup in quick time thanks to the little wonder. My pre-review at 13% progress through is that it's very good but I'm not a fan of the backstory waffle. I understand why it's there, but for a book about using the scientific method for management, I expected more factual data to hang my hat off of, instead i'm given anecdotes -which are to science what elephants are to potatoes... no relation at all. But that is far from my final word on the book, once I've finished it I'll have a proper write-up.

Week 4: gaining speed

So here it is, another week down and another week in review post!

Thankfully, the past week has been far more engaging and active than many of those that preceded it. I got caught up in the whole Ireland SOPA/ACTA debate and wrote a letter which I sent to countless representatives. In retrospect, I feel that letter says a awful lot about how I feel about the way that the Internet benefits our modern lives and promotes culture, artistic expression and even entrepreneurism. Without any of which, we would be a much poorer nation. I'm not sure what impact, if any it had, especially considering the mostly form letter replies I received it response, but that is the way of things I suppose.

I attended two events recently: Dublin Unity3D Development Discussion and the Effective Fundraising Seminar. Ironically enough, they both took place near or at Tog and only a day apart from each other. The Fundraising seminar was particularly insightful, not least because I was the youngest person there by decent a margin. 

I left out that last week I purchased a Macbook Air to bring to these events, conferences and the like. iPads, I find are just too unwieldy for the task of accurate and quick note taking, particularly when what you want to transpose is the exact verbiage of the speaker and there's no hope of me doing that with paper and pen.

So I began using Evernote as my note taking implement of choice and it seems to be working quite well for me. In the past I have had notes summarily deleted or corrupted due to Evernote's synching so I'm still backing up my notes elsewhere until I feel like I can trust Evernote. In the meantime, however I am very much liking it for taking notes. I was able to very quickly take down points of interest from both events, which I think would've been impossible with a notepad and really difficult with an iPad, certainly given the speed at which people spoke.

The text editing leaves something to be desired, you cant edit line spacing and there are some weird bugs if you copy/paste blocks of text from other programs, but apart from that it's doing the job splendidly.

By the way, a Macbook Air 13" does in fact fit inside the iPad pocket of a Scottevest jacket. The zip wont close, but it's better than carrying a bag sometimes.

I also did a bit of investigating of one of the business ideas that's been floating around. Still waiting for a call back from the supplier(s) for that, but nothing really to say about it just yet. I've been working through some other ideas also and have recently come to something that I may be settling on, we'll see. Nothing I want to talk about publicly yet, but its a good sign.

Not much else to report other than that. My printer is playing up, I'm still working on the iOS/Web App from last year despite all efforts to complete that project with haste. 

Week 3: Slow progress

The past week in review:

• Again, I am being hampered by outside activities that are distracting me from what I want to focus on. I am nearing the end of the early stages of an App I began working on last year and have put that as the main focus recently to ensure that I can get it completed and out of the way while I focus on new things.
• I bought a two week window of advertising on a podcast.
• I spent 4 days, or rather wasted 4 days banging my head against a virtual brick wall trying to fix iOS developer signature failures. Turns out Apple's provisioning portal was generating broken developer certificates. They eventually fixed it, but not after a lot of needless hair pulling and frustration.
• Started working with Parse and TestFlight betas.
• Discovered that my Mac Pro is on the brink of death, it's hard drive is on the verge of a complete meltdown. It literally takes 40-50 minutes to just boot up. So I'm going to have to replace it.
• Today I bought an iPhone 3G for development purposes. There aren't many users on older devices, but I think it warrants a small investment to buy a device to test on so as to avoid problems in the future. I am predicting the 3Gs will soon become the "lowest common denominator" on the iOS platform within the next year or so.
• I haven't made a dent in "The Lean Startup", being too pre-occupied. I will have to rectify that soon.
• I ordered more stationary from Viking Direct, it arrived fairly quickly so I'm already using it to take notes on. I will have to start getting used to the idea of always having a notepad on me. 

For the future:

• The new goal is to begin working on something substantial by 1st of February. In practice this means no more other projects or apps, but to dedicate my time to narrowing down ideas. I have a big stack in the filing cabinet that need to be sorted through.
• I am considering very seriously applying to incubators like the NDRC, DIT HotHouse etc. so will be investigating those opportunities in coming days and weeks.
• I am considering some supplemental education, perhaps some business/payroll type courses.

Week 2: a brief update and a view to planning

This past week was not very different from the last. It consisted mostly of:

• More organising, cleaning up and de-cluttering of the office. Donated a fair bit of our unnecessary items to St. Vincent de Paul this evening. It'll get rid of the clutter and maybe help in a small way.
• I have a plant spectra experiment I'm working on (more details to come) and have put it in it's own little room away from my work area.
• Organise bookmarks, folders & files and did a general clean-up of computer related stuff.
• Added a lot of tech events to my Google Calendar. I have little intention of attending them all, but I think in the coming year I should really be more present in local tech meetups.
• Did some preliminary research on advertising opportunities, mobile development platforms etc.
• Working on the last reminents of an app that has overflowed into this year, but I hope to finish soon. I know I keep saying it, but I mean it!
• Unsuccessful attempts to get my sleep habbit back on track. Its currently fixated at 6am-2pm, which is taking it's toll. This is becoming a priority for me as I honestly think its starting to wear me a bit thin, sleeping during the day and being awake during the night is no way to live.

Although I'm coming around to the fact that daily updates aren't necessary and are perhaps more of a distraction than warranted, I feel guilty for not updating this blog with something a little more substantial so I have pasted below a reply I gave on Reddit to a post to /r/gamedev asking about how other independant game developers plan themselves. I believe it gives an accurate account of my current approach to life as a one man startup.

Q. Every indie developer's dream: making it big and securing your position as an indie dev. What's your plan?

A. I am working on building up a business myself, starting from the 1st of this year I've been blogging about the process of getting started being an "one man startup".

Game development for me is just one of many possible roads which may bear fruit, I will also be working on a Web App and some more utilitarian mobile apps.

I suppose my "road plan" is exclusively not to tie myself down by notions of there being one best way. Experimenting with what works and what does not will be a crucial element of how I do business. I will be designing all the games I work on in Unity specifically because it broadens the potential customer base enormously (no platform dependance) and spreads the risk dramatically. When you are the sole person working on this kind of thing, reducing risk is an incredibly important factor.

One thing I have started doing that I could not recommend more highly is to accept that you never stop needing to learn. As much as possible, read all the advice you can, buy or loan books on entrepreneurism and business management (I am currently reading "The Lean Startup" by Eric Reiss). Never for once think to yourself that you know everything and take every opportunity as a potential to learn.

Arrogance is something that I've found is apparent throughout the software industry, it's an easy trap to fall into, thinking that because you know one thing that you know more than anyone else. I must admit I fall into it a fair bit, but I remind myself that humility is a much more important requirement to success than the drive one gets from thinking they know it all. because when you start thinking like that, you start blocking out the possibility of learning something vitally important.

My final little bit of advice is that if you really want to do this, if you want to see success, you must work hard and treat it like a serious occupation. I wasted a year by not taking it too seriously, I took on odd jobs and contracts that distracted me from what I really wanted to do. If what you really want to do with your life is be your own boss, don't do as I did and go for job interviews when you know deep down you'll never be satisfied until you are your own boss.

It's still early days for me too, but these are the things I try to keep in mind, always:

• Don't tie yourself down to one idea, process, or technology, it's all a means to an end. There is no one best way.

• Experiment with what works and what does not. Try to analyze and understand your successes and failures.

• Reduce risk wherever you can.

• Learn all you can, all the time. Never stop learning.

• Arrogance can be a driver and a motivator but humility is a much more important attribute.

• Make time for fun. It can be a hard slog working for yourself, so it's more important than ever to make time for you to chill out, relax. Try not to get too stressed out.

Week 1: A brief overview

I just want to spell out a couple of things that happened in the first week of this year long journey both for posterity and perhaps for suggestions for improvement.

The first few days went along just as I had expected it, I got a decent amount done and began to read like I had intended. Come day 4 or so, that pretty much ended to varying degrees. 

I had to replace my bed, which for the longest time has had it's springs digging into me as I sleep. I had learned in the past year or so to become somewhat accustomed to the idea that I had to sleep in the exact center of the bed and not move a bit, or else I'll get something poking me or I'd dislodge a spring and I'd hear that lovely sound... SPERUNGGGGGUNGUNGGG. 

So that ate up an entire day just purchasing the bed and then another day waiting for it to be delivered and then constructing it.

I could have or I should have rather been able to make a little more productive use of my time but I've also been feeling extraordinarily lethargic and tired lately. One of the personal goals I had set myself was to try if at all possible to completely cut out certain kinds of food, namely a small addiction I call Coca Cola and sugar.

There has always been something in Coke that was extra addictive for me, I don't know what it is. What's worse is I know the more I drink of it, the worse I feel. So I decided to give it up, once and for all. Unfortunately as time has shown over and over again in the past, every time I do so, I have to go through a withdrawal process which ranges from severe headaches/migranes and sinus blockage to lethargy and muscle aches. 

I know that it's definitely a combination of things at work: caffeine, sugar and whatever special ingredient in Coke that makes me yearn for it specifically. Whatever the case though, it plays a certain toll on the body and mind for about two weeks all in all on average if past experience is anything to go by. So I've been suffering, if you can even call it that, from sugar and Coke withdrawl symptoms for the past week.

I haven't made as much progress on setting up the home office, but I have managed to take away almost all of the toys and distractions. There is now no TV, Playstation 3 or cable tv. I will be keeping an Xbox 360 there however on the off-chance that I decide that Xbox development is a worthwhile pursuit.

I'm honestly not sure if I will though, everything I know of Xbox development says that the indie store is utterly pointless from a business perspective and that the Xbox Live Arcade application process is incredibly long, requiring fairly high production values.

I also haven't kept up my promise to stay off Reddit or other time sinks quite as much as I had hoped. I had blocked them all by router without realising that other people may in fact want to use them while I'm working, so I am going to have to find some sort of middle ground approach which literally bars myself (and only myself) from these sites until I'm used to it.

I am still working on an app with someone else from last year, which I had sincerely hoped to have been wrapped up as early as mid to late December but in any case, I hope to have that completed and sorted very soon so I can begin to focus on other projects.

On the positive side however, I have started planning for advertising for future apps. I will be purchasing a block of advertising from a very well known podcaster for approximately 2 weeks worth of sponsorship. It's early days of course, so I could see why some would consider this a premature action. However I feel pretty confident that if I haven't built something worth advertising within the next few months, the failure will be greater than the cost of a few hundred Euros worth of advertising budget. Besides which, I'm of the type that prefers to plan things well in advance, so I will be working on an online advertising plan to get the word out.

Overall I'd say last week was neither a success nor entirely a failure but definitely a damp squib.