003 : Building the ultimate roommate finder with Ajay Yadav

NNL Podcast What would you do if you came back to your apartment after a trip abroad to find out that your roommate had disappeared with the deposit, the locks had been changed, and your stuff was missing? I know my response would involve a large number of guttural screams and a healthy amount of crying.

Ajay, on the other hand, used it as inspiration to build Roomi, an app that helps people find ideal roommates. List or browse apartments, describe your lifestyle, and never get stuck with a nightmare roommate again.

After a ton of research, Ajay built Roomi from scratch — learning Objective-C in a few months using free online resources, hiring a designer, and creating a minimum viable product (MVP). He’s learned from past mistakes and really did it right this time.

If you’re still struggling to figure out your best next move, listen to this episode and follow in Ajay’s steps. You’ll come out with an awesome product.

Continue reading →

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:20 — 48.5MB) | Embed

Epiphanies I had while teaching myself to code

It’s been about a year since I decided to teach myself to code. At the time, I had a bachelor’s degree in English, a job in retail, and zero knowledge about programming. I’d had minute brushes with coding in the past but hadn’t even thought about math or coding since high school.

The impetus for learning to code came from my growing addiction to Hacker News. I, too, wanted to build cool things and understand how web apps and programs worked. I wanted to have an app in the App Store, dammit. I wanted to start a business.

But, for someone who couldn’t tell JavaScript from Common Lisp, I had no idea where to start. Continue reading →

Programming, Rubik’s Cubes, and unconscious incompetence

The “conscious competence” learning model describes four stages of competence. The first stage is “unconscious incompetence,” which is the state of not even knowing what you don’t know. Not even Google can help because you don’t even know what to type into the search bar. Last year, when I made the decision to learn how to code, this is how I felt. I was an English major in college and had used it to rack up retail experience. My knowledge of computers, while passionate, came strictly from recreational experience. Continue reading →

How I made my iPhone app: from idea to app store

UPDATE: When you’re done with this article, check out how I made (and got press on Lifehacker and Yahoo! for) my OS X app WorkBurst, two years later. I learned a lot in that time!

My first iPhone app, Reader Tracker, is officially available in the iPhone/iPad App Store! It’s been a long journey from idea to app store (much of which was spent distracted by other half-finished projects) so it’s very exciting to finally see a finished product available for sale.

Coming from a non-technical background, I wanted to show the work that got an app into the App Store. There are numerous articles imploring “idea” entrepreneurs to stop searching for a technical co-founder and to hire freelance. And this is another one of those articles. While building an iPhone app is a bit different than building a website/web application, the principals are the same. Continue reading →