The cookies pictured here magically appeared in my office today, and they’re as good as they look. She rocks.

• Sleep in on Monday Even with Steve Jobs not running the show, I’m guessing people will be queueing up for the keynote surprisingly early. Sleep in. Take the morning off. Watch the keynote later when it’s available off apple.com.
• Turn off twitter If you’re a Mac or iPhone dev, you’re probably following a handful of people that will be at WWDC. Don’t bother loading twitter, it’s just going to be full of your attending friends telling people what session they’re in, what they’re wearing and about what party they’re going to. It will just increase your jealousy.
• Enjoy your comfy chair The chairs at Moscone West are awful. Wallow in your comfy chair and appreciate it. Side note: before attending my first WWDC (or any conference) I assumed each room had movie theatre style stadium seating. Not sure where I got that picture, but I was sorely disappointed.
• Bake your own cookies I’m a sucker for treats, especially the kind that magically show up in the afternoon. The magic treats are probably one of my favorite parts of WWDC (yes, I know that’s sad). Bake your own cookies or brownies one morning. Try really hard to forget they exist and ask someone in your house to put a plate out randomly one day. Cookies! [1] Bonus points if you can convince someone else to do the baking.
• Just walk right in and use your bathroom Taking a bio-break at WWDC is tricky. Between sessions there’s always a line for the men’s room. Enjoy the fact that you can just waltz right into your bathroom and use it without waiting (and hopefully minus the sticky floors too).
• Throw your own party The nights at WWDC are packed with social events. Take your significant other (or whoever) out to a fancy dinner or just get out and do something. You likely won’t meet any new people, especially Mac/iPhone devs, but it’s very likely you’re like me and don’t get out often enough.
• Get stuff done WWDC is a lot of fun and you certainly can get a lot out of it, but you really have to consider it a vacation. As much as I tried each year, I got nothing done [2]. So stop crying about not being able to be there this year and go check things off your todo list!
• Call ADC Finally, if you’re really bummed out about not being there, use a tech support incident. Call ‘em up and just chat about something (just make up an issue). Talking to someone at Apple could help you feel like you’re there. Of course, I’m not really sure anyone’s manning the phones during WWDC since they’re all at the Moscone center having a blast! [3]

[1] – A lot of the WWDC survival guides actually suggest avoiding the junk food and some suggest avoiding the Moscone food altogether. If you’re stronger willed than I, do that. My first year at WWDC I went nuts on the free Odwalla drinks and had a tummy ache for a couple days. Pace yourself.

[2] – Of course if you show up well prepared with questions and bugs to sit down with an Apple employee you could save yourself a lot of time in that one week.

[3] Don’t do this.

• rooSwitch 1.5 shipped with some new features as well as new screencasts and a new website.
• I moved to a shared private office in downtown Boise.
• I started work on a new desktop app.

Things learned:

• Multi-tasking is evil. There’s plenty of people talking about the evils of distractions and multi-tasking. It wasn’t until this month that I made a real effort to actually turn mail, IM and other notifying distractions off for extended periouds of time. I also stopped bouncing between projects within a given day. I’m now much more conscious about what I want to accomplish for the day, and what project(s) it involves. If more than one project has to be dealt with I make sure to start on the most important and finish it before moving to the next. In the past I’ve bounced from project to project and let “emergencies” take over. Now I’m just finding an appropriate home for the “emergencies” (later) and really giving my current task all my attention.
• Routines are good. I wake up while the house is stil quiet and I start every day the same. I’ve been doing this for two months, so I know its stuck. The actual routine is personal and not important. It’s also boring. But by the time I sit down at my desk I’m fully awake and my day has started. My routine ends when I sit down to my desk and write down what I want to do for the day. Then I’m off. I’m experimenting with incorporating routines throughout my day as well. Nothing’s stuck yet, but it’s been interesting and I’m still hopefully I’ll wander into something useful.

Now for some miscellaneous jibba-jabba:

It felt good to get rooSwitch 1.5 out the door. Now close to 100% of my working time is focused on a new app, currently called Focalize.

I’m not ready to share any real details, but it’ll be an OS X app and a little sister iPhone app. If for some reason the name intrigues you enough to be interested in testing, feel free to [shoot me an email](mailto:brian@roobasoft.com?subject=Focalize me!). It’s not yet in private beta, but I hope to have it there this month.

Regarding the office space, I’m continuing to really enjoy it. Boise doesn’t have a large downtown, but it’s plenty big enough for me. I’m within walking distance to a little park and plenty of great food. However, I’m trying to avoid going out to lunch more than once a week.

I’m also trying to bike in most days. Turns out I enjoy biking to a destination a good bit more than just biking in a loop. And bonus points to the office for maintaining a nice big locker room with private showers and an awesome limited access bike room.

There was one major show stopper for the shared space: I wasn’t able to keep an external monitor, power supply, external hard drive, keyboard, mouse, etc at the office. Of course, I knew this when I signed up, but I underestimated how much I’d miss that.

As soon as I realized it wasn’t going to work out I hit craigslist. Within a week I found a potential alternative. It’s a similar style setup to where I was, but the new place will rent out 1/3 of a private office and provide a dedicated desk and all. I signed up for that and am giving that a go. The other 2/3rds of the office aren’t yet occupied, so there’s a concern with that unknown, but it seemed worth the risk.

Unexpected benefits

When planning to move out to an office, I really wasn’t looking forward to having to get in a car and drive daily. For my first year working at home (2006) my wife and I shared one vehicle, I just never went anywhere. Well, turns out the 15-20 minute commute is a hidden gem. Why? Forced detachment from whatever I’ve been working on. I didn’t really notice it at the time, but when working a full day at home, whenever I would come out to hang with the family, I was constantly thinking about what I was working on. I could have been working on nothing, but I still felt like I was in the middle of something and would always wander back to my office to check on things. It’s stupid and it sucked.

Now by the time I get home I’ve had 15-20 minutes of fully disconnected time to let me brain rest and I know I wasn’t in the middle of anything important. Not only that, but there’s a barrier to reentry. I have to take my laptop out of my bag. This sounds like a small barrier, but it’s enough to make sure I don’t open my laptop until I have a purpose and some time for that purpose. It also works well for me to just get out of my car and move right into any necessary yard work. That’s a much easier transition than having to get out of your pajamas at 4pm because the lawn needs mowing.

Of course all of that is mental and I could have fixed it with some solid discipline. I guess the point is I didn’t even see the situation clearly until I was working outside of the home regularly. Also, I lack solid discipline.

Short version

I’m doing a 6 month experiment where I focus 100% on roobasoft and see if I can support my family on the apps I develop.

Longer version

I started teaching myself to program in 1994 and it wasn’t long after that that I knew that

a) This is what I want to do for a profession (software development)
and
b) I want to some day work for myself doing it.

I’ve been doing a) but haven’t quite gotten to b). Yes, I own and operate roobasoft. Yes, I quit my full time job over a year ago. But I’ve been doing mostly contract work in that year. I want to get back to my original plan to invest the majority of my time building roobasoft into what I think it can be. I want to make b) happen in a way that I’m proud of. So with that, I’m winding down my contract work and I’ll soon be focusing 100% on roobasoft.

Why? Isn’t there a middle ground?

I really thought I’d be able to manage contracting and roobasoft apps. Plenty of people have succeeded this way. That failed to be the case for me. It’s not that the time wasn’t there. There were plenty of times when my contract work was slow. It’s the excuse that I believe killed me. It was so easy to say: Well, I can’t do ‘that’ cause I’m so busy with project X or whatever. Yet I never ceased to be able to find time to start a new ‘great idea’.

Determining success

At the end of this 6 months, I’ll either be making enough money to support my family, or I won’t. That’s determining my success or failure [1]. I’m OK with either outcome. I’d prefer success.

Removing excuses

For this to really work, I have to be able to look back and say “Well, I gave it my best.” The things I’m doing to remove excuses are:

1. Mental switch to ‘professional’. I hope to post on this more soon. I think this is big.
2. No distractions. No contracts. No side projects. Focus. I’m picking 2 projects (1 new, 1 existing) to focus all my attention on and any ‘this is a great idea for an app!’ moments that I have will be archived and tucked away for later.
3. Renting and using office space. I currently work 100% at home. I have a dedicated office with a door here, but it butts up against the laundry room (noisy!) and the kitchen (humans!). We now have 3 daughters under age 6. Even with the dedicated office, there are lots of distractions here (of course, sometimes the distractions are really cute). In order to combat those distractions, I’m going to spend at least 3-4 hours for 4 days a week in a co-working space near where we live. It’s a month to month deal, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on whether I think it’s really helping or not.
4. Making use of others to strengthen my weaknesses. The two big weaknesses I have are design and marketing. I’m seeking outside help with both of these.

Now what?

As I mentioned, I’ll be working on one new application and one existing. I’m not currently ready to talk about either, but stay tuned, shouldn’t be too long before I start talking more. I plan to try to write a blog post at the beginning of every month with a review of how things are going.

[1] – Of course it’s not that simple. It may be that I just need to go back to doing a day or two of contract work for a few months while I continue to ramp up the business. Going to have to figure that out when the time comes.

What’s next? For the short term I’ll be doing contract work (already lined up) mixed with working on my own apps. Only time will tell where that goes.

Here’s some quick status on the rooApps:

rooSwitch

The 1.2 release was started many months ago and took way too long to finish. I have ideas and user submitted feature requests that could either be rolled into a 1.3, but it’s more likely the next major release will be a 2.0. However, I don’t expect to see this happen before Fall 2008. This would likely be a Leopard only release and an almost complete rewrite (the are some things in 1.x that need rewriting )

rooVid

I finally abondoned hope of ever realesing a rooVid non-lite version on the 1.0 label. During WWDC 2007 I sketched out rooVid 2.0. In my mind it was three things:

• A video convertor featuring profiles (just like lite 1.0 is today)
• A video uploader (to YouTube, your .mac account, your personal website, etc)
• A video organizer

The feature I was most excited about was the organizer. Then iLife ‘08 with the new iMovie was announced and I decided to shelf rooVid 2 again. It seemed the organizer part and a lot of the upload and converting was taken care of by Apple in the new iMovie. Now, months after using iMovie ‘08 I realize I still want a better organizer and a better convertor and a better everything. I enjoy creating movies in iMovie ‘08 (I think I’m one of the only ones that likes the new interface) but the organizing and exporting leave room for rooVid.

rooVid 2 will definitely be a Leopard only app and I hope to have it available in late Spring 2008.

Misc

I know I’ve never been good at estimating when I’ll be able to finish an app or even point releases. I blame this poor scheduling on lack of time and poor time management of that limited time by me. Having a full time job, a family (Married with 2 small girls) and trying to do this work when possible can be hard, and very hard to do consistently without burning out. If all goes well things will be changing around the end of January/early February that will help me with this time issue and remove an excuse or two for me not getting things done. More news on that when it’s official.

Merry Christmas!

1. Turn off auto-refresh. I tell NNW when I’m ready for news.
2. Every morning I set aside 20 minutes, open NNW and fetch all.
3. During those 20 minutes I look at all the new entries and answer a question: Do I want to read or think about this more?
   1. Yes? I open the article in a new tab in NNW, in the background.
   2. No? I move on.
4. After each entry has been processed I move on with my day.
5. Throughout the day I come back and read through the tabs casually. When I’m done reading a tab, I close it.
6. Next morning I rinse and repeat.

NNW Zero: I think it’s important for me to always close all my tabs before the end of the day. I used to leave some open thinking they were important and I’d like to deal with them more later. I never do. If it’s really important, I write it down in my todo list.

Use Folders: A while back I grouped my feeds into folders. Some examples are: cocoa devs, apple, photos, life, design, … When I click on a folder to process the contents, the amount of attention I give to the contents varies from folder to folder. I’ve figured out which folders are more important to me and know which can be given less attention. I feel like this helps me process the incoming items even faster.

Feel free to leave your own tips in the comments (or links to your tips).

I’m obviously pretty excited about this and am glad I made it to WWDC this year. It’s really awesome to have something I made be recognized by Apple.

On with the thanks.

I’ll start by thanking my wife and our two girls. They don’t know Cocoa (yet) nor do they use rooSwitch, they do put up with me and occasionally encourage my programming habits.

Next the peers. I had a lot of help with rooSwitch from some great peers. Specifically (in first name alphabetical order): Andy Kim, Daniel Jalkut, Luis de la Rosa and Steve Harris. I actually got to go out to dinner with 3 of those 4 tonight (all but Daniel). It was my first time meeting both Andy and Steve in person.

Now the catch-all (cause I’m sure I forgot someone (sorry)). Thanks to everyone on the rooSwitch beta mailing list and all the users that provided feedback.

OK, that’s all.

Last year I ran a sale on rooSwitch for the week of WWDC. I even had business cards that advertised the sale. I still have plenty of those cards. Instead of making new cards, I decided to run the sale again. Benefit from my laziness: http://roobasoft.com/rooSwitch?WWDC=1.