026 : How to hire a coder without learning code

Dann Berg You have an idea for an app. Maybe you’ve even made some sketches or you have the full wireframes done. Now it’s time to hire a developer…but you don’t have any idea where to begin.

In this episode of the podcast, I share exactly what you need to do to get an app in the app store. We start with your mockups then move into finding a developer, communicating with that developer, and submitting your app. This is the entire process.

If you’re ready to finally get that app in the app store, listen in.

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025 : From Crash Bandicoot to a smarter inbox with Dave Baggett

How many unread emails do you have in your inbox? If you went all the way back to the very oldest unread email, do you think you’d actually need it? If not, why is it still there? When are you going to do something about it?

Email itself first came on the scene circa 1993, alongside Windows NT 3.1 and massive brick phones. Since then, our computers have evolved substantially — and just look at our smartphones — but our email inboxes remain mostly just a big dumb bucket.

Dave Baggett is using machine learning to bring your inbox up to speed. He’s the founder of Arcode, creator of Inky email client (iOS, OS X). Dave shares the interesting story of how Inky came to be, starting with working on the first two Crash Bandicoot games and then joining a travel startup that would end up taking over the industry (and eventually get acquired by Google).

He’s got an interesting story and a fresh take on email. It’ll make you think about your own projects differently.

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022 : Why you should have started a blog yesterday

Dann Berg by Michael Shane In this week’s podcast episode, I share how I escaped the retail world and got into tech journalism. It’s all because of a little personal website I started. I also explain how you, too, can benefit from starting your own website — even if you don’t want to get int journalism — and how to do it.

This is a special edition of the podcast because there’s no guest, it’s just me! I ended up getting so much feedback and so many questions about last week’s podcast that I wanted to tell my story in more depth.

If you don’t yet have your own website, you need to listen to this episode. When you’re ready to get going, I’ve embedded the first tutorial in my video course.

If you found this helpful, please use my Bluehost affiliate link to get your hosting and domain!

Check out the rest of the videos here!

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021 : Pitching, press, and passion with TechRadar’s Joe Osborne

Joe Osborne of TechRadar When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up taking a theater class as an elective freshman year (my mother’s suggestion) and loved it. I took more and more classes until I was eventually staring in almost all my high school plays (oh god, don’t click that link).

It only seemed natural to carry that passion over to college (as I still had no idea what I wanted to do) so I enrolled as a Theater major. But when I got to college, I just didn’t feel like acting any more. It was my creative writing classes that were the most fun for me, so I switched to an English and Creative Writing tract. For my honors thesis, I wrote a play.

But I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I graduated, I got a job in the mall at French Connection selling clothes. I was still working retail when I launched my first blog, IAmDann.com, and just wrote about random stuff. Seriously, go back to the first posts on IAmDann.com and check out the unorganized and unfocused content I was producing.

But I kept writing, and kept posting content. And after a couple years, I had a realization:

I was a writer who wrote a play and had a two-year-old blog.

As I was doing all that work, it didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything. And even though I didn’t have much focus during any of that time, I suddenly had a pretty impressive sounding CV.

I used that blog to land a full-time writing job at LAPTOP Magazine, and the rest is history.

When people say that you should follow your passion and do what you love, it’s because someday it’ll be valuable. If you love video games, and write a short post after every video game you play, it won’t feel like work. You might not even get any traffic. But eventually you’ll have a massive portfolio of work and you can turn that into a real, paying job.

My guest today is Joe Osborne, Reviews Editor at TechRadar, who is passionate about technology and video games. Unlike me, he had focus from early on, writing for small local blogs and systematically working his way up to his current position. In this episode of the podcast, he shares exactly how he did it, what he looks for in pitches, and shares his thoughts on the future of tech.

This episode is just plain fun, and it goes to show that you really should be pursuing your passion, even if it doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere as you’re doing it.

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Win a free ticket to the MoDev UX conference!

MoDev UX Conference in DC

One lucky reader will win a free ticket to the MoDev UX conference in Washington, DC this month! That’s a $799 value, and all you need to do is tell me why you want to go — I’ve got a form at the bottom of this post. But first, I want to tell you why I’m going and why you should want to go, too.

Why are conferences important?

Once of the first books I bought when I decided to quit my job at The Verge and start freelancing and working on this website full-time was Deduct It!: Lower Your Small Business Taxes by Stephen Fishman. Up until that point, my knowledge of the United States tax system was practically nonexistent, and I got the book to make sure that my first small business venture got off on the right foot.

But reading Deduct It! had unexpected consequences beyond simply understanding the law: each new chapter gave me a ton of new ideas for growing my business.

I was expecting a book about tax law to be extremely boring, but it read more like an instruction manual for kicking ass in small business. By learning the laws pertaining to certain types of purchases and income, I discovered new assets to buy and revenue streams I never even considered.

They say that the best way to learn a new language is through total immersion. That’s exactly what happens at conferences. And speaking this new language is the best way to think differently about your own projects and problems.

Why should I learn UX?

A computer science degree doesn’t teach how to code — it teaches how to think. Students still need to independently study individual programming languages, but the computer science background makes learning new languages much easier. When you already understand the concept of a linked list or an array, it’s easier to learn how to write them in Ruby, Java, Objective-C, or any other programming language.

Similarly, user experience teaches a different way to think about problems. Learning a new method for structuring a website or app will reveal user problems you never even realized existed.

Novice…no longer!

I define a novice as a person who doesn’t know enough about a topic to even ask the right questions. I was a novice when I decided to make my first iPhone app, and remained a novice for much longer than was necessary due to my stubborn desire to learn how to code all by myself and never ask for help.

But I’ve learned that it doesn’t actually take very long to exit the novice stage. The best way to do it is to find someone who knows more than you and make them talk about the topic of interest. Listening to the way these “experts” talk, and the specific points they make, is truly the real fast lane out of novice-dom.

Alright, so gimme my ticket

Ah yes, the free ticket to the MoDev UX conference!

The people who run the MoDev conference have been kind enough to give me two tickets — one for myself and another to give to one lucky reader. You’ll have access to all the workshops and the entire conference for the full two days. That’s a $799 value.

All you need to do is fill out the form below. You have until midnight on Thursday, May 8th. I’ll be contacting the winner on Saturday, May 10th.

Good luck, and I hope to see you there!