David Gary Wood

The long arm of the virus

Along came the bug We got sick, as a family, at the end of March 2022. We used RATs to test for COVID, and came up negative each time. Symptoms wise, we had aches, headaches, malaise, brain fog, bad guts, small coughs and sneezes but not the overt respiratory that comes with COVID. It lasted for around a week. About 9 days after initially becoming sick, we were feeling well enough to go out.

Optionals and force unwrapping

This little guide shows some of my rules of thumb for approaching optionals, force unwrapping, guard and if statements. When/why So we know that optionals are great, for where it’s not guaranteed that we will have a value. They’re also great for indicating when something has never been set or loaded, e.g: var user: User? However, sometimes we end up in situations where we need a variable to be there, in order to do some work.

SwiftUI - Router Pattern

SwiftUI is fantastic. I’ve fallen in love with how rapidly I can pull together a UI for iOS. The declarative and responsive nature of it, enables some really elegant code. However, I quickly found that there’s a few ‘edges’ to the experience. Dependency Injection I like to divide business logic into view model objects, that my SwiftUI views read from. Those objects have dependencies (data managers, the app’s networking layer, etc).

Birthday Cards

I hate buying birthday cards. I can never pick the right one. I’ll spend so much time, wandering the aisle, trying to find one that looks just right. That one looks perfect. Did I buy that one before though? That one’s great, but why does it say something inside instead of just being blank so I can write what I want? Writing the card is its own process. I’ll draft the words on my phone.

Getting there

Like nearly everyone in 2020, I’ve had a strange five months. For me though, this was largely due to concussion. I banged my head at the end of February, and I am very much on the mend from it all now. I keep trying to gauge what level of capacity I have back, and I reckon it’s 80-85%. My remaining problems are fatigue, and getting overloaded with cognitive load if I don’t take breaks.

Viability vs. Want

For any indie app project I want to put time to, there is a fundamental question I have to ask myself: Why should it exist? There can be many answers to this question: I think it’ll make money I just like it. I really want to help people do X I helps solve a problem I have I think it could become a source of income It’ll help teach me a new skill I think lots of people will like it The list goes on and on.

My next indie project

I’m spoilt for choice. I write down all of my app ideas. They sit there in a folder in my notes app, or scribbled in real life notepads with sketches of the UI. There’s a power, an energy in the process. Each idea could become something awesome, a tool, a service, a something that I will from nothingness into reality, simply by using my mind. Sometimes, an idea will rise to the top.

What is concussion like?

I was asked by a new friend, what was concussion like? What did it feel like? This was such an interesting question. I did my best to answer, but I probably fumbled some. I experienced headaches, fatigue, slowness in thinking. I suspect these things are pretty common. But what was it like? At it’s core, the worst defining aspect of it was a sense of disassociation and loss of self.

You Choose

“The future doesn’t exist. The future is the name that we call our imagination.” (Derek Sivers) The future is not a set destination. In western society, we’re often raised with an expectation of what the future will be. What it could be. What it should be. Go to college. Get a career. Get married. Buy a house. Have kids. Get divorced. Retire. There’s a pattern. A rhythm. There’s a certainty.

I'll see you later

As a dad, I have a very specific anxiety. I suspect it’s not uncommon. I worry about what will happen to my children, if I pass away before they’re adults. I know mine comes from quite a specific place. My father passed away the month before my 21st birthday. A heart attack. He had a disability, that made him more prone towards them. He’d had circumstances in life around him that triggered the event.

My new glasses

Since my brain injury a couple of months ago, suffering concussion, I have experienced headaches, eye problems and a general level of difficulty in thinking that I call ‘brain fuzz’. During New Zealand’s COVID lockdown, it was impossible for me to get my vision assessed. Two weeks ago, when I did, I was diagnosed with an astigmatism. The optometrist suspected that my brain was compensating for it, and then post-brain injury it lost that ability, revealing the issue.

The future is wireless

“Courage”… In our latest podcast episode, Waiting for Review, Dave Nott and I briefly discussed wireless headphones. For both of us, it seems the future is wireless, and we kind of ‘get’ the direction that Apple and others have been leading things in by elementing hardware stereo jacks. I recently sold my Edirol V4 video mixer on eBay. It was analogue, SD resolution, and I hadn’t used it for many years.

Getting to know my customers

JFDI… Since I started out with GoVJ , there has been one thing I’ve been meaning to do but for one reason or another I’ve put off. That has been surveying, and obtaining some qualitative information on my potential market and customers. There are a few reasons I haven’t done this. Time, unsureness about what questions to ask, fear of putting my head above the line and talking to people, I already knew my target market, I was a user myself… the list can go on, but it all boils down to not really wanting to experience a little potential discomfort.

Planning… A week on

My last post was about planning. I did broadly as I said in that post, and planned out development and marketing activity for my latest app. Since doing so I have encountered a series of blockages against my planned development time. Nothing ever goes to plan, right? The Blocks: Working with beta versions of iOS. I’ve encountered some bugs and oddities. I’ve had to file my first bug report. This has been quite challenging, and in hindsight I should have expected more of this than I did.

Planning as an indie developer

Erik Person blogged here about planning: As an indie for two months now, I realize I’m not taking my opportunities to plan like I should. This is a reminder to myself to spend a little extra time planning before tackling a new feature. I don’t need to write down the plan or show it to anyone, but the act of planning will be a significant boost over what I’ve been doing lately.

Further round and further in

Over the last month I have been working on a rebuild of the roboEngine. This is the code that is the core heart of GoVJ and HoloVid When I built HoloVid earlier this year, I brought the video mixing code from GoVJ into a static library and kept it mainly as-was. The static library was entirely Objective C based, with a lot of OpenGL boiler plate. My plan was to bring the library and all roboheadz products over to Swift by mid-2017.

A bit of a start

Right now I’m nearly two months into this ‘going indie’ / quitting-my-full-time-job-business and I feel the need to explain myself a little. Right now, I am not fully ‘independent’ in the strictest sense of the word. My apps are selling, but that is not providing enough for an income. I’m working some freelance work, but some days of the week are committed to developing my own products and applications under roboheadz .

My thoughts ahead of WWDC 2016

In Episode 92 of the Upgrade podcast Jason and Myke talk about their predictions ahead of next week’s WWDC event. I thought I’d take the time to catalogue some of my thoughts, predictions and create a mini wish-list. 1 watchOS 3.0 Despite some level of reservation, a few weeks ago I purchased an Apple Watch. So far I’ve found that love it, but. That but is that the overall experience itself feels laggy.

Clustering Data and Exact Matches

One record to rule them all… In my full-time job I’m both a Customer Insight Manager and a data developer. We have recently developed a “Single Customer View” (SCV), or “Single Customer Record”. Our customer data is UK business data. It is possible for businesses to have records within our two different billing systems with variations of their name, different locations, different people responsible for paying our business, different accounts etc.

Through the eyes of a child

Through the eyes of a child This weekend we upgraded my wife’s iPad. This meant that my older iPad 3 and her original iPad mini 1 were available for our kids. They had been using 2012 nexus tablets. Arguably these were from a similar era to the iPads but they lag so much when doing certain tasks now. The iPads do too at times but nowhere near as much. It’s a statement on how well iOS9 can run on older devices perhaps but that’s besides the point of this post.

Writing

The long arm of the virus

Optionals and force unwrapping

SwiftUI - Router Pattern

Birthday Cards

Getting there

Viability vs. Want

My next indie project

What is concussion like?

You Choose

I'll see you later

My new glasses

The future is wireless

Getting to know my customers

Planning… A week on

Planning as an indie developer

Further round and further in

A bit of a start

My thoughts ahead of WWDC 2016

Clustering Data and Exact Matches

Through the eyes of a child

Let's get in touch