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Don’t Quit Your Job
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons is entirely coincidental. Why do you want to become an indie developer? If your answer is "to make money," then boy, do I have some bad news for you. Look, I'm…
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On Writing Poorly, Still
Three years ago, I decided to turn my portfolio website into a blog. I wrote an embarrassing post about how bad I was at writing. Now, I'm happy to report that I'm still terrible, but at least I can churn out terrible posts at a faster rate now.…
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The Devolution of UI Design
Back when I got my first Mac, I was really into UI customization. I'd spend hours on websites like MacThemes and DeviantArt, looking for the next cool theme or icon for my Mac. My favorite theme was Milk by Max Rudberg. There were all sorts of people…
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How to Make Money from Apps
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of a subscription-based web service, so I might be a bit biased. And I'm not even following my own advice here. So, please take my words with a grain of salt. You know how sometimes you see someone launch an app and then people…
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Why Did You Choose Such a Stupid App Name?
Gibberish was originally named 'Hottakes'. When it got to a point where it wasn't totally embarrassing, I showed it to a friend who is more business-savvy than I am. He gave me lots of advice. He said that I should make the app free and add social…
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Designing the onboarding process means making some screens that highlight your app's features, just so your users can press 'Next', 'Next', 'Skip', 'No Thanks' to start using the app.
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How to Comment on Social Media
Rebecca Solnit (via Kottke): 1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book…
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Watching People Use a Computer
When I was 17, I took the driving license test. The test has two parts: a theory test and a road test. The theory test had 50 multiple-choice questions that were selected from a list of 500 questions. The questions were in Malay, and my Malay was poor.…
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The Prince, The Carpenter, and The Merchant
Once upon a time, there was a prince. He had all the wealth and comfort and luxury in the world. And yet, he was unhappy. So he went looking for answers. He eventually found one: basically, everything in life involves suffering, even the things you enjoy.…
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Online Communities That Are Not for Me
I've come to realize why I've never been able to fit into the Reddit community. Because Reddit is basically a bunch of reply guys replying to each other. You find reply guys on all social media, but Reddit seems to be specifically designed for them. On…
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My Computers
My first time using a computer was at a tuition centre during my primary school years. It was a generic beige box, probably running Windows 95, but set to boot in DOS mode. I remember having to go to C:\WINDOWS and type win to start Windows. The first…
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Singapore Ruby Brigade
In 2007, I joined the Singapore Ruby Brigade, a Ruby user group in Singapore. I wasn't one of the founding members, but when I joined, most of them were still active. We used to have a small meetup every month, with around 20 people attending. Usually,…
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Stormgate and ZeroSpace
Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games have become less popular in recent years. Many developers have left Blizzard, which was then bought by Microsoft. After that, even more people were laid off. So, it seems less likely that we'll see a new RTS game like…
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Are Indie Developers not Rich?
Sean Heber, on Mastodon: [...] I'm a software engineer who's not making those big bucks everyone else seems to be making. I work for a small company that's barely hanging on. I used to easily afford eating out and buying toys and still have a bit of cash…
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Custom Domains with Gibber.blog
A few years ago, I started 1Embed, a simple embed code snippet (a.k.a. "tag") manager you've never heard about. The name is similar to 1Password because, with 1Password, you only need to remember one main password. Similarly, with 1Embed, you only need…
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Janitorial
The problem with making a YouTube-related browser extension these days is that your users will associate any YouTube-related problems with you. ... even if the problems are caused by YouTube itself or their adblockers. (YouTube has clearly said, "Turn off…
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Gibberish Is Now Available on TestFlight
Gibberish is a blogging app that looks and feels like a messaging app. It's a bit weird, but that's the point. This UI tricks my brain into writing mode, just like when I write long messages to my friends. Here's what it looks like: Thoughts and Posts In…
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Twitter Replacements
Out of the 3 Twitter replacements, Bluesky remains invite-only. Threads seems to have inherited the bad parts of Twitter. Mastodon seems to have inherited the good parts of Twitter. But I'm still not using any of them heavily, for various…
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The Disappearing Details in iOS UI
Louie Mantia, on Mastodon: I’m gonna say it. The only people who shit on “skeuomorphism” or rich design in software are people who didn’t know how to do it or work with it. The aesthetic with gradients, shadows, highlights, *color*, shading— it all worked…
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`status` is a Code Smell
I have this bad habit of using as few database columns as possible. I'm not sure why I developed it. Maybe it's because my younger self thought fewer columns equaled better performance? (Which is probably true, but you're not making your app more…