Author Archives: Janie Larson

My Semester Project

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Background

Back in Fall of 2010 I came back to school to learn computer programming. I came in hopping to achieve a skill in something like Java so that I could get a decent job doing computer programming for a health insurance company.

I waffled my way through the first year and a half of the program. I treated it very much like my Journalism degree where you could blow off the assigned reading and ace the midterm without studying to much. This was a very bad idea. After four semesters I had unofficially dropped out of the program and wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with my life.

I decided a year ago to dedicate myself to programming. I wanted to master it. I wanted to be one of those programmers like Andy Hertzfeld who was one of the top people in the field who helped create the Macintosh operating system.

I gave myself a year and a half to get there. I had three semesters left to finish school. I buckled down and turned learning programming into a full time job.

This is the last semester. This is the semester where I need to begin the process of leaving school and entering the workforce.

Advanced iOS

One of my classes is Advanced iOS Development. One of the requirements we have is to create an app with the idea that we will be able to submit it to the App Store.

I really wanted to work on a Core Audio app. One of my goals is to master Core Audio. I haven’t had a chance to learn this as quickly as I wanted to, so I figured, “Great! Now I have to learn it because it is my semester project!”

I have since figured out that this is a really bad idea. I am super busy this semester and trying to learn something difficult on top of that would result in bad things happening.

What I am planning to do is to refactor my WWDC app submission. I applied for a scholarship with an app I wrote in two weeks. The app is a Portable Wine Journal.

I have the original version of this at Github.

The app “works”, but it doesn’t work the way I would like it to work. It needs a lot of refactoring.

I have a massive list of things that need to be added, upgraded, or fixed:

  • Change to Universal from iPad only
  • Add Apple Docs
  • Change how the data is stored to Core Data
  • Change the point at which data is stored, now if you navigate away from the page the data won’t save
  • Create a picker for grape type rather than make the user type each one in, allow the user to add grape or fruit types
  • Create a picker for region type, also allow the user to add ones they commonly use
  • Figure out how to locate the winery on a map and store the information
  • Figure out how to set the text box up to search specifically for wineries and allow people to see them in a list when they start typing
  • Put a slider in for dryness level rather than typing a label
  • Put a switch in so user can choose to label the wine by name or grape type (wines usually don’t have both)
  • Allow the user to select the wine in the table to modify the form
  • Allow for editing and deletion
  • Format date better
  • Figure out a better way of tracking wine ratings
  • Make the view grouped and figure out how to get the background to show up
  • Do some more general design things to customize the app and polish it

I will be using this blog to track all of the changes I make to this app. I will figure out how to show the changed I make in my GitHub account so that you can go through and see all of the changes as they progress.

I am also going to document other projects, classes, and processes in this blog that I am currently working on. I have let the ball drop on this blog for a few months and now it’s time to get back to work. Geronimo!

The Road Not Taken

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I probably spoke earlier in the year about my various disappointments regarding WWDC 2013. I applied for a scholarship and I did not win.

Someone I met somewhere I can’t remember who talks to me on Twitter told me about another conference happening at the same time, GLS 2013. GLS stands for Games Learning Society. It is an interdisciplinary group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is made up of tech people and education majors who are trying to create a learning experience through games

This conference opened my eyes to a multitude of things I had never considered. They showed me tools that others had developed with the express purpose of teaching children how to code by creating their own games.

This spoke to two things that I hold very dear: Gaming and using games to learn.

I grew up playing “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” and “Oregon Trail”. I never had a video game console or any of the “fun” games my peers had growing up, but I had games. I loved games.

I can only learn is something is interesting to me. I am very compelled by story. The only reason I know anything about astronomy is because of the vast multitude of celestial object that are named for mythological characters.

For me, the GLS conference was a life-changing experience. It really focused my attitude towards not just becoming a developer, but becoming a game developer.

I wonder how different things would have been had I gone to WWDC.

There was some focus on gaming at WWDC, but the vast majority was focused on grand-master programming. They focus on people who want to scale a code version of Mt. Everest.

I go back and forth. Sometimes I really want to be an elite-grand master programmer who scales Everest because it is there. Other time, I just really want to share my thoughts and ideas with the world and create nice tools that other people can use.

I am beginning my last full semester of school for programming. I am on a track that I hope to continue to take. Right now I am kind of taking inventory of where I am, where I want to be, and who I am right now.

I had a very turbulent summer that I intend to write about at some point. It is still hard for me to talk about, so I hope that if you read my blog you will be patient with my lack of responsiveness over the summer.

I am planning to write here more regularly. I have been advised to keep a public blog of my projects for my development class and this one is already established. Stay tuned for the next few months. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

Bartle’s Player Types

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A few years ago I was introduced to The Sims 3. My then-fiancee and I were living with another couple and the male half of the couple bought the game. He recreated their living situation with characters based on all of us.

I was familiar with The Sims (I wasn’t living under a rock!) but I had never seen or played it before. I thought it was fascinating. Later that year for my birthday our roommates bought me a copy of the game and the World Adventures expansion.

I wound up accumulating a half dozen expansions for the game. I started really getting into programming and I stopped playing it because when I was on my computer I knew I should be coding and not playing games. I eventually deleted it off my machine because I needed the space.

Sims in College

Living la vida Sims

A few months ago my husband got bored and started playing with it. The way that he played the game was completely different than the way I played it.

When I played the game I would create a bunch of different games and characters so that I could do different professions and hobbies. Any expansion that included a new hobby or another set of professions was one I had to obtain. I really like the Supernatural one and I wanted to get the University one before I put my life on hold for programming.

My husband only created one game and one character based on himself. He chose the profession that made the most money, ate the Sims equivalent of ramen noodles, and set about taking over the town. He saved up money so he could buy a business. Then he bought another and another. He kept asking me how many expansions I had and for every one he asked, “Can I buy that business?”

After he went through every expansion I had, bought every business he could, and bought the biggest house he could buy, he stopped playing. I doubt he will ever pick it up again.

I thought his playing behavior was insane. Why on Earth would you play The Sims to go out and buy every business in the town? The money isn’t real. It isn’t a microcosm of what it would be like to actually own a business in the real world. Why bother with doing that when there are so many options to explore?

Last night I learned about Bartle’s Player Types. These types are named somewhat after the different playing card suits:
Card Suits
A) Diamonds/Achievers: These people are Diamonds because their objective is to accumulate riches. This can be game currency, reaching the top of the leader board, etc… All other parts of the game, like socialization and expanding the world exist only to find new sources of treasure.

B) Explorers/Spades: These people are Spades because they like to dig around in the environment to see what is there. Explorers don’t care about wealth accumulation, socialization, or killing unless doing those opens up options for the player to explore.

C) Socializers/Hearts: These people are Hearts because the act of human interaction is the draw for them. The game is just the medium that these people use to find other people to interact with. They will help others further their goals if it allows them an opportunity to socialize with that player.

D) Killers/Clubs: These people are called Clubs because they enjoy clubbing people. These would be the stereotypical First Person Shooters players whose only enjoyment in the game is imposing themselves on others and killing other players. So these guys are the sociopaths of the gaming world.

Most people don’t fall solely into one of these categories. They usually are strongly one and have a secondary trait of another.

I found it interesting that this theory explains the different ways my husband and I would play The Sims. The Sims appeals primarily to Spades and Hearts, but there was a component in there to appeal to Diamonds as well.

The Sims is a very well-designed game that accommodates a lot of different player types. I think that many times if you are designing a game you are creating something that appeals to your player type only without thinking about adding components that would appeal to the other types.

This was a revelation to me about how many different types of people can all play the same game and how my husband’s way of playing the game, while not the way that I would have played, was not wrong.

Gamer Gurl at Open Mic

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Last night I went to watch my sister-in-law perform at our local open mic night. She killed, but that isn’t the point of this post.

The fourth person to perform was a girl who looks kind of like Claudia from Warehouse 13. She gets up and tells everyone that she is a true nerd and “enjoys playing role playing board games.”

I start working up some righteous nerd rage. No gamer in their right mind would say that! There are RPGs, there are German-style board games, there are MMORPGs, but not “role playing board games”.

So I start going off on App.net about this person cooping my identity for lazy humor and pretending to be a member of a culture that she doesn’t understand. I was slightly tipsy so I hope I made semi-coherent arguments.

I wake up this morning and I realize that I really missed the punchline on this (no pun intended). While I was eviscerating this person on ADN, the rest of her bit was complaining about how the boys she was playing these games with wouldn’t look at her boobs. She complained about how she really likes sex and how no one would just push the game off the table and take her then and there.

I play board games. The idea of someone, for any reason, sweeping my $100 copy of Agricola onto the floor for any reason horrifies me. I highly doubt any real gamers of any gender in the audience would approve of this occurring.

This truly disturbs me. We have a bad enough time where almost every single female character in a video game acts as a prize for the protagonist with no wants or agency of their own. We don’t need someone who has never actually participated in our community to validate to the people in it that women are empty headed mannequins who want nothing more than to be taken violently by victorious nerds as their prize for being awesome.

When I play games or go to a conference I want to be treated with respect. I don’t consider it a mark of respect to have men checking out my boobs. I don’t want the men that I play games with to see me as their prize for completing the game. I just want to be a person who also happens to enjoy the same things as a lot of other people who happen to be men.

I also think it is lazy humor to make fun of a common stereotype. Hey look, there are boys playing games! They must be nerds who are terrified of talking to women! There are so many jokes to be done about that! No. There might be, but someone with enough of a brain to not get on stage and complain about lack of harassment will be the one to make them, not you.

The Conference Difference

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I attended a pair of conferences this past weekend: Design Madison and UXMad. I attended as a volunteer along with some other people.

One of my fellow volunteers behaved in a way that made me very upset.

The way the Sapling Event conferences work is that when the conference is about to begin someone walks around with a cow bell to get everyone’s attention.

My co-volunteer heard that and said very loudly to the conference goes, “Hey Sheeple! You need to moo-ve!” imitating a cow.

Female Developers

Awesome inspirational female developers and speakers.

I was furious that someone who was representing this company would behave this way. I don’t think anyone else really heard this happen, but I was appalled that anyone would think it is okay to speak that way.

I have a very good reason for wanting Sapling Events to not be embarrassed by their student volunteers.

Back in February 2013 I attended my first conference. The conference was Snow*Mobile, a mobile development conference in Madison put on by Sapling.

My teacher Eric Knapp told us that the conference organizers allowed students to attend the conference in exchange for several hours of volunteer help. The conference cost several hundred dollars, which is a lot of money to an unemployed college student.

I went to the conference not really knowing what to expect. Going there was a life-changing experience.

I had an opportunity to meet a lot of prominent developers from around the midwest. I got to listen to a bunch of talks about technologies I was unfamiliar with.

I discovered why on earth people use Twitter. Twitter gave me the chance to tweet a speaker telling them I liked their talk. It also gave me the chance to talk to these people about something specific rather than just awkwardly trying to make conversation until we found a common thing to speak about.

One of the conference speakers mentioned the K&R book on C that I wanted to read. I tweeted him and told him it was on my to-read list. He told me after I read it he wanted to read my blog post about it. I didn’t have a blog then, but I do now! (Again, thanks Ray Hightower).

The first day of the conference when we broke for lunch, I didn’t really know anyone at the conference. I was too shy to just sit down with someone so I sat by myself feeling bad because I was eating alone. I felt a light punch on my shoulder. It was the videographer with the conference. He said, “You. You’re eating with us. We’re up on the stage.” That moment let me know it’s okay to just go up to random tables at conferences and eat with people you don’t really know.

Eric says that many people feel like they “found their people” at their first conference and I agree with this assessment completely.

I really enjoyed my time there and I became a conference addict. I found a CocoaConf that was happening in Chicago the month after Snow*Mobile. I carpooled and roomed with a classmate of mine I had never really spoken to very much.

I got to meet a huge number of people at CocoaConf. Among the people I connected with were Chris Adamson, Jonathan Penn, and Daniel Steinberg. I forged some amazing connections at that conference. I never would have paid the money to go there had I not seen how important these conferences can be to my professional career. Additionally, my conference roommate is an amazing person that I am planning to work with on an app in the near future.

Big Tiger

Big Tiger rocks out to Eye of the Tiger at the UXMad After Party.

Getting the chance to attend Snow*Mobile made one of the largest impacts on my potential career. I am so happy that Jim “Big Tiger” and Jenifer Remsik opened that opportunity up to myself and others. I hope that this one bad experience does not convince them to stop hiring student volunteers because their generosity has enriched my life so much.

I hope that I have the chance to pay things forward later in my career. We all get to where we are because people like the Remsiks give us a hand. Sometimes people squander the opportunities that others give them and that is a shame. If someone takes a chance on you, do your best not to let them down. If you do, then work hard to avoid doing it ever again since there are limited opportunities in this world and each one is precious.

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Oracle

Barbara Gordon

Today on App.net I noticed that a lot of people were changing their avatars to super hero characters. I thought it looked like fun, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon and do the same.

I got called out by another user for following the hive mind and doing the same thing everyone else was doing.

There is a certain amount of validity to this point, but I had a few really good reasons for picking the avatar I chose.

I chose Oracle, aka Barbara Gordon. For those who are not in the know, Barbara Gordon was the first Batgirl. Her father is Commissioner Gordon. In 1988 The Joker came to Commissioner Gordon’s house and shot

Barbara Gordon Shot

The Joker shoot Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke.

Barbara, not because he knew her secret identity, but to send a message to her father. She did not die, but she was paralyzed from the waist down. She was confined to a wheelchair.

She did not want to give up on her calling of being a crime fighter, so she learned computer programming. She became a super hacker and put together a female team of super heroes called The Birds of Prey.

I am a red-headed woman programmer. I admire her tenacity in not allowing that event to prevent her from doing what she wanted to do. She worked around her constraints and did not let a setback keep her from kicking butt.

I am a very literary person. My handle and my blog are named after a character from Alice Through the Looking Glass. I believe that characters from literature can speak to our better natures. They can allow us to walk in another person’s shoes and see qualities in them that we would like to have in ourselves.

This speaks to the dearth of female characters in popular culture. We get enthralled with characters in various medias and we like to see characters that represent ourselves. When women go to a movie and only see women as girlfriends or mothers, it is very discouraging. We want to see smart, brave, capable women. We want to see people who look and think like us. Men get to, why can’t we??

Barbara Gordon Chair

Just because she can’t walk doesn’t mean she can’t defend herself!

Whoopi Goldberg spoke about the pivotal moment in her childhood when she saw Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek and ran around the house screaming, “Mom! There is a black woman on the TV and she isn’t a maid!” Nichols said that she was planning to leave the show when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told her what an inspiration she was to the black community.

There is every flavor of white man on movies and TV. We have handsome charismatic people (James Bond), slacker stoner guys who inexplicably have hot girlfriends (Seth Rogan), violent anti-heroes who murder people and do bad things (Walter White). You name it, it exists. Why are these stories more important or identifiable than ours are?

You can argue that stories are flaky or unimportant, but they are vital to the formation of identity. By refusing to have more characters like Barbara Gordon in mainstream media we are saying that those people’s perspective doesn’t matter. That is tragic.

GLS 9.0

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First off, I would like to apologize for the lack of updates on my blog. I had a lot of time where nothing interesting happened, but then I also had a lot of time where a lot of interesting happened and haven’t really had a chance to put out a steady stream of information.

From June 11-13 I went to the Game Learning Society 9.0 conference at the Union in Madison. This is a group I was unfamiliar with. I went because someone on Twitter told me about it and said it looked interesting. Since I had my heartache with WWDC I took this as a consolation prize.

Holy crap! This conference was the most mind blowing thing I have done recently.

The group that puts this conference on is an interdisciplinary group at UW-Madison. It encompasses the Education department, the technology department, and other groups to study how to utilize gaming in education.

One of the big things I keep hearing about at programming conferences is how we can get children, especially girls, to code. I have had ideas in my head about applications I want to author to introduce children to programming concepts. Before I came here I had no idea that anyone else had already had that idea and made things (but to be fair, it really isn’t an original idea).

We were shown games that kids created using a program called Scratch. They had a list of at least 20 different programs that kids use to create games and learn how to code. I was only familiar with a couple of them. With these programs kids can go into a game engine like Unity and create a game. That then acts as a gateway so that when they reach the limit of what they can do without knowing how to code they are then introduced to learning code as a means of expanding what they can do.

I also heard a great deal about how to actually get technology into the classroom. Schools want software and games for their classes. However, there is a rigorous amount of hoops to jump through and most people (including myself) are unaware of it. So if you create a game to teach something but you do not submit a lesson plan or a rubric or justify what specific testable skills your game will accomplish it won’t be implemented in the classroom.

I saw that a person from NYU created a game that works on an iPhone or iPad where you go around New York and visit places that historical events occurred. I think this is a brilliant use of the iPad. This could be done outside of educational contexts for people who are visiting New York any other city who want to look around without being stuck in a tour group.

I saw enough while I was there to grasp that we are not even scratching the surface of what these devices can do. There is a huge demand for quality software on mobile devices, especially for education that is not being met.

One problem that I think exists is that the better you are at programming the more out of touch you get with what non-programmers actually want. One thing that I think helped Steve Jobs was the fact that he wasn’t a programmer or an engineer. He simply had an intuitive feel for something that he knew he would love and thought other people would love too. I am not dissing Jobs, who was brilliant, I am simply stating that when you get too close to the code you tend to only be exposed to other people who think like you do and want what you do. It gets harder to go to something like this and see that there is a large demand for something you were unaware people wanted.

It was very helpful for me to go here and see what I need to do if I want to write educational games to put in the classroom. I think this is going to become more and more important as time goes on. We are in a crisis in this country right now. Children don’t vote, so education is becoming a large political target.

For a very long time private companies were not getting a taste of the money going into public schools. Now that things like “No Child Left Behind” have been implemented, test prep and test creation companies have flourished to the detriment of the educational system.

Private companies are creating charter schools that are no better than public schools but cost far more because they need to turn a profit.

Teacher’s unions are being busted. No one wants to be a teacher anymore because it is not really possible to make a living at it and the criteria needed to be a teacher is complex, confusing, and onerous.

If you can offer a uniform solution to education where you don’t need to train a great teacher but have them implement a program that has the possibility to change things. A program can be replicated. A black student in a poor school in Chicago can have the same learning experience as white student on the Upper East Side. You can offer more choice of what people can learn than if you have to hire a human being to do so.

I think we would live in a better society if we paid teachers better and had more people in the classroom, but I don’t get to have what I want. I can either watch as things get worse or I can try to offer solutions to offset the damage being done by the people who run this country.

Plotting The Course

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I finished my semester (yay) and I am off to explore a few months of being able to do whatever I want.

I have some intriguing prospects. The coolest one so far is that I am communicating with the founder of an iOS start-up in Austria about going there for a month and completing my internship requirement. I am super excited about this possibility.

I am being offered a place to stay and help getting there, so if I can break even on my travel and living expenses I will consider that a great achievement.

I am starting to figure out what I am going to learn and how I would like to do so. My initial, not-thinking-things-through plan was to master Core Audio. This is still a large goal that I have that I want to work towards as quickly as possible.

But now I am thinking about what do I want to do with it. I also have interest and experience in graphics. This seems like a good opportunity to do Game Design. I know most people who do programming probably want to do Game Design. I am certain it is probably like my experiences in the Audio Recording industry where the cooler a certain career path is, the more sexist and intolerant it becomes.

I would like to design my own games. I have several ideas that I would like to implement. One that I had was far too advanced for me to do on my own and I had to figure out what I would do. I could go to someone about it and risk them taking the idea away from me and cutting me out of the process. I could talk to other people I eventually want to hire about co-owning the game with me, but I did not think that would go well. I eventually was able to formulate a less-complex version of what I wanted to do and I believe I can accomplish that on my own in the next year or so.

But where does that leave Core Audio?? I made a personal commitment to learning that this summer. I know that if I go chasing after every single whim and interest I have I won’t get anything done. I need to really figure out what I ultimately want to do so that I don’t waste this valuable time spreading myself in too many directions and accomplishing nothing.

Another fly in the ointment is my husband. He is under the assumption that since school is over I have no commitments and I am available to do stuff whenever he has a whim. We went to Star Trek Into Darkness on Friday morning because he took the day off. I don’t think he understands what I am trying to do.

That would not have been so bad had today not been so difficult. I felt like I hadn’t slept and I wound up taking two naps today because I felt exhausted. So I did no work on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. I made some progress in my C programming book today, but I feel like today was mostly a wash. I can have those days periodically, but if I am going to try and treat this as a real job, I can’t randomly spend my day playing Portal and napping with my dogs. I hope tomorrow works out better.

My progress through the Core Audio book is slow but steady. I completed the first two chapters. I could probably plow through them more quickly, but based on how hard it was to process the other information during the semester for iOS, I hesitate to go too fast through the book. I am trying to spend a few days on each chapter and go through them about two a week. The earlier chapters are probably easier, so I will reassess when I get further.

I thought I knew C pretty well, but there are a lot of commands I am using that I am not familiar with. I am going to go more in-depth with C while going through Core Audio.

I will give another update at some point soon since this is the first full week I have to myself.

The Day I Became a Programmer

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I have spoken a little about my first introduction to programming. It was five years ago and the language was Perl.

I did not progress very far with Perl. I got confused about functions and I did not have anyone to really talk to about my confusion, so I kind of forgot about it and got distracted by other things.

Nearly four years ago I began taking programming classes. I figured that if I had people to talk to and deadlines to meet it would be easier to keep from being distracted.

That worked somewhat well for a while. I took programming classes but I couldn’t remember how to do simple things from memory since we only did them once before moving on to another topic. I found “for” loops confusing because I could not remember what each slot in the parenthesis was for. I had to look it up any time I wanted to do one. I didn’t understand why people wouldn’t just do a “while” loop because it felt so much more straightforward to me.

So I kind of stumbled through programming classes for a few years. I would take the into course to a language and go over arrays, for-loops, and other things another time. Every time I heard it things made a little more sense. I was turning my homework in and I sort of understood it. I had a bad feeling that there was a lot more to it than I was processing, but I was trying to tread water to keep from drowning.

Finally I slammed into a wall: Object Oriented Programming.

The first language I learned, VB.Net, did not talk about OOP in the first semester I took. We kept getting further and further behind and we did not talk about it. When I took the second VB.Net class, the teacher assumed we knew it. The first time we saw classes, we were like, “What’s going on?! There is more than one document! How do they communicate?!”

I had to drop the class because I had absolutely no idea what we were doing. I wanted to take a semester off. I felt burned out and depressed because everything was so hard. Everyone else I talked to seemed to have be programming for years and already knew this stuff. I felt like a failure.

At some point around a year ago, I started using the web site “Code Academy”. They went over these introductory concepts again, but I could do the tutorials over and over again and things began to click. I felt comfortable with these concepts and I knew I could learn this.

I decided to take Java in the fall because the teacher I had had for my first programming class designed the curriculum and I knew that I could learn from him. He had since moved on to designing the iOS curriculum, so I followed him to that program too.

The “Intro to Java” class was the best programming class I have ever taken. One of the first things we did in that class was learn OOP. By tackling it immediately and using it over and over again we were able to process what programming is and how it works.

I consider the day I finally understood OOP to be the day I became a programmer. I have been messing around with it for five years, but it wasn’t until nine months ago when I had that first breakthrough.

I have all kinds of concepts that I have encountered that I did not understand. Delegation in iOS has been one. It is easier to keep working at something you don’t understand once you have had the experience of having a breakthrough and finally getting something that was hard.

I feel that I have made so much progress over the last year. I hope that this is just the beginning of a long period of productivity for me.

I know a year ago I felt very unsure of myself. I did not want anyone to ask me any questions because I was afraid they would figure out that I didn’t actually know anything. I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like I can learn anything I set my mind to and I am up for the challenge. Bring it on!

WWDC: The Canary in the Coal Mine??

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I am a current iOS student at a tech school in Madison, WI. We recently began offering a degree in Mobile Application Development utilizing either iOS or Android. This seems to be a growing field and many teachers at our school have felt that we are leaving money on the table by not producing mobile application developers.

For the last three years or so, our school has sent two students to WWDC on a scholarship. Before, at least to the ones I spoke to, you filled out an application.

This year you were required to produce an app. The limited information I have at this time says that most people who received a scholarship application had an app in the store already.

I heard a story from someone saying that a few years ago a student won an award at WWDC and immediately started a company that makes millions of dollars a year, but still takes a class a semester to maintain his WWDC scholarship eligibility.

You know what, fine. Part of me was thinking about delaying my graduation to have another bite at the Apple next year when I have been doing this more than a few months.

However, a lot of this bothers my Spider Sense.

This year the WWDC tickets sold out in 90 seconds. This bothered a lot of developers who worked on Apple programs during the Dark Ages before the iPad.

I got my first Apple computer in 1984. I think I am one of the oldest people that exists who does not remember a time when they did not own an Apple computer. I have never owned a computer made by any one other than Apple. I remember as a child being confused as to why I could not just buy any software I saw because it said “IBM/Tandy” on the side. I stuck with them during the Dark Ages of the mid-90’s when their imminent demise was all but certain.

I am not alone in this. The estimates that I saw were that 20,000 people all logged into Apple to try and snag 5000 tickets to WWDC. I have no idea how many students applied for scholarships, but I would not be surprised if it was comparable to that number.

I might be displaying Hipster tendencies, but to me, when I see numbers like that it is a warning sign to me that it is time to leave the party.

My previous attempt at a career was in Journalism. When I was trying to break into that field I was told that there were 50 applicants for every job out there.

I am getting a sinking sensation that Apple development is becoming a similar situation. It is hot right now, which means that more people (like myself, I guess) are having a crack at it. When there are too many people going after something, it becomes less likely to succeed.

Look at law school. Law school used to be a stable, well paying career. Now it is over saturated by people trying to find somewhere to land in their professional lives.

I think something will change. My sense, along with recent news, tells me Apple is headed for a crash. I do not know if that means I need to move on to whatever comes next or if this is a readjustment period to purge excess developers. Either way, I am not certain that WWDC 2014 will attract the same people in the same quantities.

If anyone knows what comes next, let me know!! 🙂