Development

The Question Have you ever been on a long-haul flight and wondered: Exactly how far can this plane fly? Are we pushing its maximum limits, or is this a typical route? What if every single seat was full, or half the plane was empty? I love thinking about this stuff. I’ll spot a 787 on the tarmac and immediately start calculating where it could go nonstop from my local airport. The problem is, the existing tools for visualizing this were boring, clunky, and mostly built for commercial pilots or aircraft buyers. They locked down the data, only featured aircraft I didn’t care about, and often felt highly inaccurate. ...

If you’re an indie developer, you know the grind. You’ve spent months building your app, and now it’s time to get it in front of real users. A promo code giveaway on Twitter or Reddit seems like the obvious first step. It is what I do, it’s what everyone does. I felt it was also a strategic mistake. The Real Cost of a “Free” Giveaway The “first 20 DMs get a code” approach isn’t just inefficient - it’s a liability. Every manual giveaway burns hours of your most valuable resource: time. It creates a frustrating user experience, especially for folks in different time zones, and it leaves your most powerful growth opportunity completely untouched. ...

Life Badger has officially made its way to MacOS and tvOS! What started as an iOS-only experience has now expanded, allowing users to track their achievements and progress across even more devices. The process of bringing Life Badger to these platforms was surprisingly smooth, though there were a few challenges, mostly revolving around UI adjustments for Apple TV. The Process of Moving to MacOS Bringing Life Badger - Achievement Logger to MacOS was relatively simple, thanks to Apple’s Universal Purchase support and the ability to reuse much of the SwiftUI codebase. MacOS supports SwiftUI well especially in Mac Catalyst mode, so much of the app’s core functionality and layout translated seamlessly. ...

Update: Today I Am has been sunset. I may bring it back to life in the future. The app will continue to work on devices with it already installed. I’m excited to share that I’ve just released my newest app, Life Badger! 🦡 This app has been a project I’ve worked on after hours and during weekends when wanting something creative to dive into. It started from a few very specific ideas: I wanted an application to track planes I’ve flown on, national parks I’ve visited, and theater shows I’ve seen (Not to expose too much of my non-software engineering interests! 😉). But as I thought about it, I realized all these ideas shared a common theme: There are so many todo apps, what I wanted was a to-done app. Some of your achievement lists will get updated often, while others, might only change every few years. ...