A Game Like Tetris

How I'm using LLM's via Emacs

The advent of LLM's and the subsequent explosion of developer tools for interfacing with them has made being an Emacs user better than ever. Since Emacs can be molded into whatever you want it to be, the latest agentic tooling can be grafted into Emacs and integrated into your workflow with little ceremony.

FlyerFalcon: next steps.

Searching for the largest bang for my buck of what to spend time on next for FlyerFalcon. I’m at a fork in the road, where I could do more product work, or I could create web pages to get more traffic.

My experience so far with the Phoenix web framework

Yesterday I briefly mention that the first draft of FlyerFalcon’s feature page was done.

Frustrations with Modern Computing

The first draft of flyerfalcon.com/features is done. Copy is fine, will probably tinker with it more in the future, but trying not to spin my wheels too much.

FlyerFalcon: Building feature pages

Earlier today I discussed the short-term content creation plan that I have for FlyerFalcon. My goal is to provide a foundational set of webpages that thoroughly signal what problems are solved and the value of what’s being provided – for both potential customers and search engines.

FlyerFalcon: A Marketing Plan

A few weeks back, I spoke about a new project that I’ve been working on called FlyerFalcon. I’d like to discuss how I’m thinking about product development these days, and how this new project fits into my overall business architecture.

Perfectionism is a Bootstrapper's Worst Nightmare

I took most of last week off, which was much needed to clear my head. My wife and I walked on a beach, ran our dog around, and dreamed about our future. I always underestimate how useful taking a couple of days off is, to recalibrate and plot a new course of action.

FlyerFalcon: I started building something new

In August I started building something new. It started as a small side project while learning a new stack (Elixir + Phoenix, more about this another time), but has turned into much more. It’s called FlyerFalcon, and aims to be the easiest way to generate paper business flyers for promoting businesses, services or events – locally.

Things you shouldn't do when building a startup

Here are some things that you shouldn’t do when building an internet startup:

Improving my sales funnel with product usage videos

Today I splurged and bought a license for a video recording/editing tool called Screen Studio. It aims to make video creation from content recorded from the desktop, easier. So far, I haven’t been disappointed!

Minimizing product scope, focusing on product improvement

It’s been a couple of week since my last update. I’ve had my head down working through an extensive ideation phase for the next Swift Starter Kits release, implementing a far more focused and featured foundation for new apps.

Fixing LCP and reducing vendor dependencies

Between Tears of the Kingdom sessions (which is flippin’ amazing), I managed to get some work done on the Swift Starter Kits landing page.

Subscription Starter Kit: Initial App Layout and SwiftUI Navigation

With the planning and ideation done, I’ve set to work on an iOS starter kit that will provide all of the infrastructure needed for a cloud enabled, subscription ready native app with reusable foundational features.

Subscription Starter Kit: A minimal SwiftUI boilerplate with in-app subscription capabilities

I’ve been thinking a lot about the next step to take for SwiftStarterKits product work. Tons of ideas, but limited time for execution. I want to make sure continuous investment in the product line is time well spent.

SwiftStarterKits' RevenueCat Integration: The Story So Far.

With the first version of the SwiftStarterKits documentation published, I’d like to shift gears to improving the SwiftStarterKits core product. While the existing documentation needs more investment, I simultaneously started marketing product features that don’t currently exist.

Shipped SwiftStarterKits Documentation

I’ve recently been working on building out a documentation system for SwiftStarterKits, which I write about in detail here and here.

Practical SQLite3 Reference For Developers In A Hurry

SQLite is a terrific, lightweight, general purpose tool. But, as it is with all computer related things, I occasionally find myself needing a reminder on how to achieve certain database related tasks.

Building a Documentation System with Common Lisp and Pandoc

I’m currently working through a first draft of a custom self-hosted documentation system for SwiftStarterKits. I wrote about the overall goals of this system yesterday, and is definitely recommended reading for continuity.

Working on a Documentation System for SwiftStarterKits

Since the first customers purchased a SwiftStarterKits license, the most frequent feedback I’ve received has been to improve documentation. So that’s what I’m focusing on.

Developer Ergonomics with Common Lisp

All of the websites that I maintain are being served with Common Lisp, utilizing the Caveman2 web framework.

March 2023 Update

Dang, it’s already Spring.

February 2023 Update

My wife and I were knocked out for the final week of February with COVID-19, the first time for both of us. The start was rough, but luckily it receded to a stuffy nose within a few days. We effectively managed the situation with hot tea and soup, and once the worst was over we rested the remainder of the week, quarantined and caught up on House of the Dragon and The Last of Us.

My Bicycle is Eating my Mind

Quoted from the book User Friendly:

January 2023 Update

This past month I struggled at building my company. Wearing all the hats brings with it a tremendous amount of context switching, but I’m learning to manage it better. Writing, website work, emailing customers, learning to market, and trying/failing to do actual product work feels like juggling too many things. Maybe I’m not prioritizing my time correctly, and am pushing the rock up the wrong hill? Time will tell, but I feel momentum building again.

Learning to Cold Email and Shrinking Product Scope

It has been a light couple of weeks on SwiftStarterKits work. I’ve been writing cold emails to professionals in several fields, and researching the market of another idea I’ve been kicking around. It’s a new muscle for me, and I’m trying to make a habit of it.

December 2022 Update

This past month has been full of learning, building, writing, friends and family. For the holidays, taking some time off of startup work was a good decision. I always underestimate how valuable it is to take a step back, reflect and recharge, and am perpetually surprised afterwards that I didn’t in fact "waste valuable time". Instead, I return to my desk reinvigorated and ready to tackle my endless array of problems and puzzles.

Firebase iOS App Template Launch

I’m long overdue for an update on SwiftStarterKits. My previous post, designing a free app template was nearly two months ago! Towards the end of that piece, I mention an estimate on building the already planned ‘SwiftUI Firebase Template’ as being two weeks. Boy was I wrong.

Designing an Upcoming SwiftUI App Template

After my previous brainstorm about next steps for SwiftStarterKits , I’m now working towards a completely free and open source app template, focusing on the boring parts that aren’t usually business differentiators (login, signup, password recovery, etc).

My First Startup Pivot

After a week of working on a side project with a friend, I’m eager to get back to SwiftStarterKits. I have a huge list of things I want to work on, but have been apprehensive in choosing what the immediate top priority items are.

Cheese by JG, an iMessage App Collaboration

Alluded to in my previous post about building an iMessage app, I’ve been working on a software/art collaboration with the artist JG Debray. The project, Cheese, originated from a print of JG’s that hangs on a wall in my apartment titled JG’s 60 favorite Cheeses.

Building an iMessage App

I took a small detour the past couple of days from SwiftStarterKits to build an iMessage app. Here’s a short "how-to" in creating a standalone iMessage app:

Shipping a New Product Page

The first version of SwiftStarterKits shipped without a dedicated product page. Upon landing on the website, you’d see some basic information about the business, followed by a section which gave a walkthrough of our single product. At the bottom of the section, a "learn more" button exists, which links directly to the Stripe store page. This was enough for version 1.0.0, I think, but ultimately limits product upsell opportunities and copy experimentation. So we built out a dynamic product page which leaves some room to grow alongside our products.

Day 0 of Building a Software Business

I’ve been working on a project in my spare time called SwiftStarterKits. It’s shipped, functional, and pre-revenue. What exists so far is the bare minimum that I figured constituted a viable business.

A Fresh Start

It’s been a while since I last shared a professional update. I’ve been feeling like it was long overdue for an update of some kind, in addition to a "re-launch" of this website (along with a fresh new domain and a ground-up rebuild, which I’ll discuss separately 🙂). Here’s a quick TLDR of what I’ve been working on for the past 5 years:

Translating Your Bash Configuration to Eshell

One of the mental barriers I had in making the switch over from iTerm2 + Bash to Emacs’ Eshell was translating my .bash_profile (or .bashrc on some systems) into Emacs Lisp. Over the years my shell configuration has grown modestly, providing a slew of shortcuts, functions and styling customizations.

Key Value Observation in iOS 11

It seems like the past few weeks in iOS news has been dominated by the addition of the Encodable, Decodable and Codable protocols - finally fixing the ugly problem of dealing with JSON in Swift. The deprecation of the open source libraries that simplify dealing with JSON is a good thing, and I hope the community at large can come to an agreement that we’ve found an optimal solution to the problem.

Using the Builder Pattern on iOS

Some of the most involved and repetitive code we write is the instantiation and configuration of objects. So why ever do it more than once? As an objects interface grows, the amount of code needed to instantiate the same object externally will grow equally. This increases the possibility of inconsistencies between similar objects, and obfuscates the task at hand.

Since May

A lot has happened in the past 6 months. Apart from the terrifying election that recently came to a close, I’ve moved to Hoboken, got a new job and shipped some cool software.

Bits and Colors in Swift

While perusing Apple’s Swift language guide, I came across an interesting section regarding bit manipulation. Unbeknownst to me, Swift sports the same bitwise and bit shifting operators used by both C and Objective-C. Here’s a recap:

Swift's Comparable Protocol

My last blog post I wrote briefly about Swift’s Equatable protocol, which allows the use of == and != between custom defined types. Naturally, I feel its fitting to talk a bit about Equatable’s close relative – the Comparable protocol.

Swift's Equatable Protocol

Mathematical notation provides the foundation to which programming languages are built. These universally understood symbols allow us to convey meaning and intent to our programs in a concise way. The mathematical operators utilized by Swift are just regular functions with special names. For example, the ‘==’ operator tests equality between two types.

Application Coordinators in Swift

This past week I came across an interesting talk post by Soroush Khanlou introducing the idea of using coordinators when building iOS apps. I decided to take a crack at the concept by building out a small login/sign up workflow using coordinators to drive my app logic, in short, the experience was a revelation.

UIStoryboard Woes

Since their introduction, UIStoryboards have been a hot topic in the iOS community. Some people love them, some don’t. I’ve gone through stints of Storyboard use, but generally have come to avoid them.

What will make you a better software developer?

How to we define “better” in the context of software creation. What makes a software developer better? There really isn’t a common metric to define such a thing. Are they faster? Is the code they produce cleaner, more extendible or less buggy? Do they know more? Probably some combination of each.

Strings, Emojis and Generators.

A core feature of any programming languages is the ability to model and manipulate text. When defining a variable that represents text, we traditionally call it a string. In Swift, strings are a series of encoding-independent unicode characters. This means that any character can be accessed directly by their unicode representation and vice-versa. For example, the hexadecimal unicode representation for the capital letter ‘A’ is ‘0x41’, which can be accessed in a Swift string like so:

Understanding Swift's SequenceType Protocol

One of the great features of Swift’s collection implementation is the first party support of various “higher order” functions like map, filter and reduce. When Objective-C still reigned supreme, the iOS open-source community created their own abstractions in an attempt to make Objective-C more functional. While the community did a wonderful job of making a verbose language more terse, it never really felt like Objective-C was meant for it. This time around however, Swift gives us built in support through the SequenceType protocol. The Swift Developer Library defines SequenceType as being any “type that can be iterated with a for…in…

My Year in Programming

Starting a blog has been on my todo list for a while now, I can finally check it off! I thought that a good place to start might be a look back at my year in programming. Being a new year, there’s no better time for reflection.