How a Florida kid’s “stupid app” saved his family’s home
pando.com
pando.com
But no, it's business-y-fake-success-killing-it-bullshit all the way down.
Actually, the entire Phabricator (http://phabricator.org/) site is so anti-business-y it's delicious. The bottom of the page links to Pokemon. I realize it's just it's own sort of marketing aimed at people like me, but it is worth pointing out.
- When closing a ticket, you can choose 'Resolved', 'Invalid', 'Wontfix', or 'Spite'.
- When choosing custom permissions for an object, you can choose allow/deny 'when the moon' 'is full'/'is waning'/'is waxing'/'is new'.
- Submission buttons for text fields are sometimes 'Submit', and sometimes 'Clowncopterize' or 'Avast!' or something equally ridiculous.
I love that, but I wonder if those unrelated links could lower SEO rating slightly. I'm half-joking.
Under "Actively Developed":
- Most patches make it better.
- Only some break it.
- Written in PHP so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program.
- Even babies and dogs can contribute.
Or under "Track bugs":
- Keeps track of bugs.
- You can assign them to people.
- Maybe you could fix them eventually. (optional)
For a team to maintain that perspective (that their app is not going to solve world hunger any time soon) requires some real humility and open communication. You've got to take it seriously enough to produce quality work, but not so seriously that you convince yourself it's anything more than a stupid app at the end of the day.
only if they have egos you have to worry about offending. egos can be a really horrid thing.
Depends on the people you bring on! If you're upfront about how you feel about your app, and make sure that they relate/agree, I don't think it should be that much of a problem.
He needs to rebuild the app with a better monetization strategy so he — and Schlofman — can start making decent money off it.
That's the advice I give to aspiring app store millionaires: on average there's no money in the app store, but there's plenty of money to be made making apps for someone else. Throw something on the store that's above the level of flashlight app, and point to it when in contact with a potential employer. There is no ??? step, you just move straight to Step 4: Profit.
Then you can get the job. The App only appears to help.
People may think "If I write something and it gets enough attention, facebook or google might buy me out" or something to that effect. Basically a get rich quick kind of deal.
You only have to write one! thing, cash a multi million dollar check and be set.
While that may have happened in the past a couple of times, wanting to start an open source project just because of that possibility would be nearsighted. But starting such a project to promote oneself is not.
It is a great addition to your CV. Something future employers can directly check up on.
My wife is going to let me do one more app, and if it doesn't earn enough to break even, I am instructed to shut down operations.
I am very impressed with and jealous of this kid's success.
I don't have any iOS devices--I'm just curious.
As a developer, it was wildly successful (can't overstate that enough). As an entrepreneur, it was a big failure. If, as an entrepreneur, you're jealous of his success, you need to reevaluate your priorities and consider a change of profession.
Too much Silicon Valley navel-gazing here.
Maybe "Silicon Valley navel-gazer" would be better.
When I was a kid the best I could do was have opensource stuff out there used by thousands of people. Personal gratification was high, but my wallet never got anything out of that, there just weren't any decent distribution channels for non-free stuff. And this was less than ten years ago.
Kudos to the kid!
It took me ages to realise that you don't have to just give your software away for free and that is fine too.
This quote makes me want to drop everything and walk off into the forest.
Keep doing your own thing and building confidence in exploring your own paths, because there's a whole world out there that's going to tell you how things should be done and what defines success (to them). They're even going to sound really smart and appear to be doing things right based on some metric for "success", but only you personally can figure that out for yourself. It'll be harder to wrestle with figuring out your values, but will be far more worth it in the end, always stay true to what you want to do.
Once you build some confidence and consistent integrity in your values and your own life approach, then come back.
@caffinatedmonk I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I regret. I regret not learning the boring structure of programming. The general terms and ideas about programming languages, computer science terminology, low-level stuff like kernel and operating system design (and thus hardware design), even some of the math to understand and talk about algorithm efficiency. All of that is necessary once you get a little older and want a really cool, creative job. Most of us put off learning the boring stuff because it never seems as important as the fun stuff you can do now, and then we have to deal with those consequences later in life.
Also, i'd suggest you keep working in open source. There's a lot of professionals and good best practices to be found in open source software. Important stuff that seems to be missing in the code released on HN (another reason to get out now!). Follow the good open source examples, make some cool things or contribute to others' projects, and start building a mini resume out of code you've done.
As more practical advice: you can learn programming languages like .NET, Java, C++, PHP and Python if you want to get crummy corporate jobs that are a dime a dozen. More fun stuff will probably be in some obscure language. Figure out what kind of programming excites you, then look into what kind of projects there are like that out there and what languages and tools they use.
Oh, and for god's sake have some fun. Computers aren't everything. Go outside, climb a tree, read a book, hang out with people. Computers will last forever; youth won't. (Sorry, I know that's off-topic)
Your last point, about having fun, is a good one. Lately, I have been very busy with school and programming. Between my school work and my programming, almost all of my day is consumed. You have a good point.
Thanks for the advice!
Probably he is in the right track though. A lot of people find good mentors just by contributing to an open source project.
Working on a corporate team is nothing like contributing to OSS on your own, you will have to relearn a lot of stuff. It's fine, just don't get frustrated when it happens. In fact a lot of programming I felt like I "learned again" as I grew older, e.g. having used a functional language and coming back to Python I found myself writing it very differently from how I had before.
Learn a variety of weird languages. There's not much to be gained from knowing both Ruby and Python (except maybe when you're looking for a job), but if you've used Haskell and Smalltalk and Erlang and TCL you'll learn things from each that make you a much better programmer.
Never stop learning. Pay attention to that little voice in your head that says "there must be an easier way to do this" - it's usually right.
Read lots of code, and write lots of code, and have fun. If you're suited for it, you'll know.
> They had to move into a much smaller apartment, and at the age of 16, Sayman found himself in the strange situation of helping his parents make the mortgage payments on the new place.
This part sounds strange to me.
This is a culture I'm very much unfamiliar with. Thank you.
In those cities, any caring family who can beg, scrape or borrow the funds sends their kids to private schools, including most middle class families, and many poor families (off a combination of scholarship money and extended family contributions).
For me, I moved and changed schools my senior year of high school. I was happy to do it. I had lots of friends at my old high school, my parents bought a business that was located an hour from our residence, and they pitched the idea of buying a house and moving.
I was in a private school, Catholic, but professed atheist so not very popular with my religion teacher, among other religious teachers, and it was causing my overall GPA to suffer when I had long been a Straight-A student. I switched to a public school more local to the business, graduated third in my class (better than my previous rank in about equal class size), and wound up being able to go to RIT (Rochester, NY) on a decent set of scholarships, with lots of help from my parents.
But more importantly I had just recently gotten really good at making friends, and recognized that taking a year to make some new friends before going off to college was going to be good practice for later.
Anyway, there was no end to the line of people ready to tell me how good it was of me to go along with the idea in my last year of high school, and to not throw tantrums or put up a zillion roadblocks, tell my parents they were ruining my social life by making me change schools, or feeling any of the thousand other ways that a teenage kid can feel gravely slighted by their parents or family when they need to move or make some other major change for some reason, when they are just trying to go on living their lives and do what's best.
A lot of my friends would not have been nearly so happy to move and change schools, I'll admit that. I mentioned enough things that went well, so it's also easy to recognize that any of those things could have turned out differently.
Maybe they know the kids are technically/scientifically inclined so they are sending them to a school with a better science program than the local schools. Maybe they are religious and believe that their children need a religious education. Whatever it is, it's because how their children are educated is more important to them than owning a home.
Why?
The public school system in Florida is known to be very bad. My parents felt it was more important for their children to get a good education than it was for them to eat out, go on vacation, drive a nice car, etc. I am eternally thankful to them for that, and, in my opinion, since they were never able to save for retirement or have an emergency, my brother and I are just that.
My guess is that this kid's parents also felt the same way. Obviously, they made the right decision.
If Mom and/or Dad are also working minimum wage jobs, it's impossible to pay mortgage payments in even relatively-inexpensive large cities.
As a personal anecdote, my grandmother helped her family pay the rent when she was a teenager by working as a waitress. Her father had died at a young age. My parent's and my generation were both fortunate enough to not have to worry about this.
Unfortunately, here in the US, this type of family arrangement will only increase in the future, given the fact that this generation is the first generation in modern US economic history where the a generation is worse off financially than their parents were at the same age.
Which does kind of make sense, considering they are in all other regards the exact same thing.
Source: While I live in the valley now I grew up in Miami and still own a house there.
> Instead, it took sheer force of will and a refusal to back down to any of the obstacles he faced. That, and an unholy faith in the power of Google to answer his questions.
Don't get me wrong, this kid is pretty awesome, and I'm happy for his success. But let's be serious: He got lucky with a silly fun app that caught on.
From his creative Instagram marketing, to his deals to get a server, to his numerous app enhancements and rewrites to address problems, he's got a lot more than "luck" on his side.
Your could argue the Flappy Birds guy got lucky, but this kid had multiple successes, setbacks and kept (and keeps) fighting to move to the next level.
Must be wonderful to have a validated idea fall in your lap like that!