[? music ?] [Treehouse Friends]

Hi everyone, my name is Pasan,

and today I want to talk to you about raising your profile.

Whether you're an indie developer, a freelancer,

or you work for someone else, it's always important

to highlight your skills, past experience,

and knowledge in such a way that you'll always be open to new opportunities.

Today we're going to talk to Sam Soffes.

Sam is an iOS developer who has been in the game a long time.

He's worked as a freelancer.

He's worked for startups, and he's worked for big companies.

Today let's talk to him and hear what he has to say

about raising your profile for someone who is new to the tech world.

Sam, thanks a lot for taking the time to do this with us.

You're my inaugural interview,

and for those who don't know, tell us a little bit about yourself,

and by little bit, I mean I lot.

[Sam Soffes] [iOS Developer] All right, thanks for having me.

I'm an iOS developer living in San Francisco.

Do you want the whole story?

Yeah, from the beginning.

So in high school I was doing Mac apps just for fun,

and the iPhone SDK came out, and I was like, "This looks amazing,"

because I sort of know how to do this, so I started doing that,

made an app called Bible that's pretty popular.

I had my first job and then did some freelance for a bit,

moved around, and now I'm here in San Francisco.

I was at a company called Seesaw, but now I'm freelancing.

I guess in there I made Cheddar, which was pretty popular for a bit.

It's like a Mac iOS web app for to dos.

I don't know, I've done a lot of stuff.

Let's start at the beginning.

How did you learn to code?

You said you started off doing Mac apps.

How did you learn to code, and why?

It sounds like you taught yourself.

Yeah, so way back in 5th grade,

I was 10 years old, my local ISP was having HTML classes,

which is pretty hilarious.

It's nothing that happens anymore.

But my mom wanted to learn how to make websites,

so she's like, "Well, let's go," and I didn't have a babysitter, so I tagged along.

And she didn't really get into it, but I was like, "Oh, this is amazing!"

I started doing HTML in Notepad way back in the day,

and then I got a Flash 5 demo at some point along the line,

and somebody was talking about it or I saw it.

I was like, "What is this Flash thing?" so I got a demo.

And I wrote my first if statement in ActionScript in Flash 5

just tweening a ball, stupid stuff.

And I guess I took a C++ class in high school,

which the teacher didn't really know anything, but it was still pretty cool, just encouragement,

like we'll figure this out together.

I did that for a bit and then picked up PHP

because I wanted to make better websites for clients,

and that's very similar to the C syntax, so I was like, "Oh, this is easy enough."

It's all similar to ActionScript.

This is all kind of the same, just more $ signs.

And then went to an Apple event

in Atlanta.

I was living in Kentucky at the time, so I drove down with a friend

just because I was an Apple fan.

I didn't really know Apple development, and they were showing off all their tools,

and I was like, "This is incredible!" so I bought a book and taught myself

Mac stuff because I liked Apple stuff.

I completely understand that.

Now, where did you get your start in iPhone development?

What prompted you to jump onto that platform,

and how did you teach yourself?

For our students out there who are teaching themselves iPhone development and iPad development through us,

what prompted you?

How did you go about teaching yourself how to code

and then translating that into what you do now?

["How did you go from teaching yourself how to code to making a career out of it?"]

I think the biggest thing with learning anything is doing it,

so I wanted to make a Mac app after seeing the Apple stuff at that demo,

so I was like, "Okay, I'm going to buy a book and figure this out and go make something."

I had a project in mind and went and made it.

And same for the iPhone.

We were talking at my job, and I was like, "Well, why don't we make an app?"

"Yeah, why don't we make the Bible?" and I was like, "All right, easy enough."

I had no idea, but I was like, okay.

My first interface bullet wasn't even there yet.

From the very beginning it was super hard to do anything.

I was like, all right, I'll figure it out,

and I spent 6 months and fought through it, had no idea what I was doing.

The first version was probably really terrible.

So that was your very first app that you did?

Yeah.

Wow, and for those who are listening, to put this in perspective,

that's been downloaded well over millions and millions of times now.

A hundred million, yeah.

They had their big party a couple weeks ago.

So walk us through that experience.

I think one of the biggest things for our students

is that sometimes they'll go through tutorials

and then wonder where to go next.

Back then when you were starting on your first project,

when you got stuck, what did you do?

How did you teach yourself?

["When you get stuck, how do you work your way out?"]

It was tough, because by law, you weren't allowed to talk about it

because it still hadn't been released, so you couldn't even talk to anyone.

It was really hard, because there weren't great resources like Treehouse and Stack Overflow.

I guess when I was stuck on something I'd try to understand

more about the problem and less of there's an error, and I don't know what it means,

and I'll google it, and I'll get no results.

It was like, well, crap.

It was more like, okay, what did I do recently

to get me in this spot?

I'll try to work backwards and understand more.

I think a big mistake a lot of people can make early on

when learning something is I want to understand everything there is to know,

and then I'm going to start.

They treat it like a college or something,

and I think that's a really terrible way to start,

especially iPhone or Rails or whatever you're learning.

They are huge, vast frameworks, and it would take you years

to understand them, and then by that time, it would all be different.

It's a huge waste of time.

But I guess when you're stuck on something it helps to get a little more context

to understand more about what you're stuck on.

There's a balance to trying to understand all of it,

but I'm trying to remember back.

I'd walk around like I have no idea and think about it for a bit,

like oh, maybe I'll try this, and it happened to work or didn't work.

So it was very much getting stuck,

figuring out that one block and then moving on,

getting stuck again and progressing from there?

Yeah, it was very slow and tedious.

The way I learn anyway is trial and error,

so when I'm doing anything new

I'll say, "Well, I'll try this. Well, it didn't work.

I'll try this. Oh, okay."

And eventually I'll get it, so I think doing is the best way to learn something

than trying to understand all of the book knowledge.

Personally that doesn't do anything for me.

I'd rather get in there and play with it.

Absolutely.

With all this experience that you have, is it any different?

Or do you still work through, get stuck?

It's kind of the same thing, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Now it's way easier because there's so many resources.

IOS specifically or whatever else

there's a huge amount of things to know,

and it's impossible to remember it all.

I'll find myself—I've done this a bunch of times.

I found something on Stack Overflow and went to comment.

This is exactly perfect. This is the best answer.

And then I saw a comment from me years ago with the exact—

it was like oh, well, all right.

I search for stuff all the time

because I can't remember how to do stuff,

or I might learn something new, like all the new stuff in iOS7.

Obviously no one has any experience with it because it's brand-new, or whatever else.

It's like, okay, I'll sit down and spend a couple hours and learn it

by playing with it and making a little demo app or something.

The theme of this discussion, because you have a lot of experience in this area,

is how to raise your profile.

You've come a long way from when you first started.

You have a lot of great apps, Shares, Bible.

Walk us through that.

What specific steps do you take?

What advice do you have for people who have taught themselves how to code?

What's the next step?

Because now the gold rush is over.

You've got to put a lot of effort into it,

especially if you're doing indie development like you are

to raising your profile and being able to market these apps.

Walk us through that.

["What steps have you taken to raise your profile?"]

Personal branding I think is really important, and it's something I've spent a lot of time on.

I didn't just stumble upon whatever position I have in the community.

There's intentional effort put into that,

which sounds weird, like "I'm going to try to be famous today."

But it really pays off,

because I can tweet something and get 1,000 clicks pretty easily,

which is really powerful,

which is crazy because TechCrunch has hundreds of thousands of followers,

or I don't even know, tons.

But they'll tweet something, and I've had them write a story about something I've worked on

and got a couple hundred clicks, and I was like, "This is insane."

People that are into me are really engaged

in what I have to say, which is flattering.

Pretty cool.

I guess one of the reasons people respect me—

this sounds so arrogant, this whole thing—

is open source stuff, because I've put out a ton of open source libraries,

and that was my start.

Some of that stuff came from code that was in Bible way back in 2008.

I know that's probably terrible, but I've been doing it since the beginning.

I wrote some stuff that I'm going to use in another app, so why not let everyone use it

instead of hoard it all?

And people seemed to really like it, like "Oh, yeah, you saved me all this time. Thanks so much."

I think that's where the start of it came from, but I'm super open about everything.

That's in your DNA analysis.

Yeah, you can totally go download my DNA in GitHub.

There's 3 or 4, I don't even know, Founders Talk interviews.

They're an hour and a half each, and it's my entire life story

from when I was super depressed.

It's long.

I talk about pretty much everything.

I think a lot of people find that refreshing.

Some people in their online persona take a lot of time and thought

into what they're going to say and how they're going to project themselves, and I don't really do any of that.

I'm like, "Here's what I'm doing.

Today I hate my client work, so that sucks."

You let your work speak for itself.

Yeah, exactly.

I work really hard on what I work on, and I try to make it really good,

and some people appreciate it, and I get people that are like, "Oh, this guy is stupid.

His stuff is terrible," and whatever, I don't care.

One question is that you are both a designer and a developer.

I want to be a designer, yes.

Talk about that.

How has that helped what you do?

Is it essential to know those skills?

The baseline for all these questions is you've taught yourself how to code.

Is that set of skills essential as well to creating this career path for yourself?

["Is learning cross disciplinary skills important to advancing your career?"]

I'm not a great designer.

I can make some stuff that I'm really happy with and some stuff that's terrible.

It's like, "Okay, I've got to find someone to help me."

And so you're seeing the gold rush is over,

and that's a really big shift from 5 years ago.

If you have the first anything, people are going to go download it, because that's all there was.

Now there's probably not any super new game-changing ideas.

There's a million Twitter clients.

If you want to make a Twitter client, you've got to make a really special Twitter client,

and that's the thing with any kind of app.

And a lot of that is if it's really pretty and has a good icon.

A lot of developers starting out don't have science skills, and that's fine,

because it's really 2 completely different skill sets.

Partnering with a designer I think is a really good move you can make from the beginning,

and I do a ton of apps with other designers.

I did work on Roon with Drew Wilson

and a couple other apps coming out with designer friends,

because I'm not skilled enough to design them.

But I know if I was to do it it wouldn't be good,

and there's no point in putting out something that's terrible

unless you're just learning and want to test the waters.

But for me, I want to put out something that's excellent,

so I'm going to work with a designer to help me,

and I find that having designed stuff myself, it's a lot easier to see where they're coming from,

and everyone I work with I have a lot of feedback,

and we'll work together on it.

They'll do all the actual work, and I'm like, "Why don't we try this?"

"Oh, that's a great idea."

And coming at that together, even if I was on the other end of that as a designer,

having feedback is essential.

Working with someone I think is really fulfilling

on the developer end as well as having the end result that's pretty is really important.

Does that answer the question?

Yeah.

To summarize, it really helps you work together as a team,

because you understand their frustrations and their workflow,

and you can gel better, for lack of a better word.

Yeah, absolutely, and I find that designers, especially if they're a really great designer

but they've never done iOS before, and they're doing an iOS app,

it's like this is going to be really painful,

because they don't understand all the intricacies of touch devices and whatnot.

An experienced designer, especially a designer in code, is amazing.

They'll have the same thing right back.

You can work really well together.

On Roon, it's a blogging app I run,

the designer also does all the HTML and JavaScript, CSS and stuff.

We work really well together because he understands where I'm coming from,

I understand where he's coming from, and we can get stuff done.

If you're just starting out, finding a designer friend

would be a huge thing to work on some stuff together,

because there's a ton of good benefits.

I'm a big fan.

So you've taught yourself iOS development

and then got a job in it or had a job and then taught yourself iOS development

while you had the job?

I was doing PHP at LifeChurch, which is where I was after high school.

I did a couple flying apps, and a guy hired me to make a YouTube ripoff,

which was pretty hilarious.

It was totally out of my league, but it was a really good time.

Not to get too sidetracked, but he's like, "Hey, can you make this?"

I was like, "Well, sure,"

having no idea how to do it, but I was like I'm going to learn and figure it out

and learn by doing.

It's really good, but anyway, I was doing PHP,

and iPhone came out, and it was like I kind of know Objective-C.

Why don't we make something?

I was really fortunate.

I got to spend 6 months working on it as my job

and not having to do it on my free time.

That was really great.

So I do a ton of Ruby on Rails stuff as well,

and I've learned that in my free time shortly after my first app came out.

I think the difference between learning during your full-time job

and learning in your free time is that learning on your job

there's not any sort of cost.

It's like I'll just mess around and learn all this stuff for the fun of it,

and that's great, and if you can get paid to learn, that's incredible.

But learning on my own I was like okay, I want to make this thing, and I don't know how,

so I'm going to do everything it takes to make this thing

as quickly as possible, because I don't have a ton of time.

I think the sense of urgency, because your time is limited, helps.

It's definitely a different way to learn something.

Interesting.

Say I know how to code, and I'm looking to get a job in iOS development.

What do you recommend as some of the steps I can take

to raise my profile?

Do I work on side projects, or do I try to build apps on my own

to showcase the skills that I have?

What are some of those ways that our students can land a job

once they've learned these skill sets?

["What are some of the different ways you can land an iOS job?"]

When I was at Scribd, we were hiring like crazy,

and I interviewed tons and tons of iOS developers,

and because there were so many candidates, I had to be like,

"Here's a set of rules, and I'm going to eliminate people."

Basically if you'd only ever had 1 job,

if you got a job as an iOS developer and you'd only ever worked on 1 thing

and then you applied somewhere else, I'm not going to hire you,

because you probably can't do anything on your own,

and you're just going to rely on the people that are there that are better than you.

I want people that are more self-sustaining.

If you've never done any side projects, I probably wouldn't hire you,

because finishing a project, like the last 10% of anything,

is really hard and not fun at all,

and everyone is really bad at it,

because it's not fun.

You have to finish all the things and fix the last bugs you've been putting off.

Showing that you can finish and ship is really important.

If you've done at least an app,

even if it's not amazing, just something on the store,

sets you way above tons of people who have never really finished anything.

Open source is really huge.

If you've contributed anything on GitHub

or if you have your own stuff that people are using,

that's really huge.

That sets you way above a whole other big class of people.

My ideal candidate is someone that's done freelance for a while,

because freelance is really great because you have to try a bunch of different things.

For example, none of my apps until recently

had ever needed to use Map Kit.

One of my clients used Map Kit.

Oh, I'll go on Map Kit.

You learn a bunch of stuff you'd never have to know stuff I was like—

obscure things that I've never needed to know.

But I need it for a client app, so having done freelance

you touch a lot of different things, and that's really great,

and you have to finish and ship because people are paying you.

I mainly look for people that can finish

and have done a bunch of things and show that they can work independently.

Tangibly that's side projects and open source.

Okay, now going back to what you said,

that an ideal candidate would have had some freelance experience,

that was the second question I was going to ask you.

How can one go about getting that experience now?

You're an indie developer, and you do things on your own.

How hard is it to do something on your own?

Or you've done client work as well. You've done it all.

So let's talk about some of those non-employer roles.

One, how hard is it to be an indie developer and make money?

Just touch on that. I know these topics are really vast.

And then secondly, freelance work.

What should someone who just learned how to code—

where should they look, how can they land freelance gigs, that kind of stuff.

["How do you go about finding freelance jobs building mobile apps?"]

The biggest thing transitioning from a salary to not having a salary,

which is kind of terrifying the first time you do it,

is having a big enough buffer.

I was fortunate enough my first big freelance thing after I left my first full-time job

paid me half down, and I always do everything half down

I think because of this.

It was enough money that I could pay my rent for a couple months,

and I had time to finish this project,

and I got the check the week I was quitting.

It was amazing.

No financial stress.>>Perfect setup.

It was really great, so if you can make that happen, that's really huge.

Otherwise you have to bankroll yourself and save up and hope you find something.

And if you've never found a freelance gig before,

it's probably not the best idea,

and even recently switching from being full-time at Seesaw

to back to freelance in indie,

again, I had work lined up before I left

and had down payments before my salary ended

that was enough to cover me for a couple months.

That's the biggest thing, just solving the financial stress,

and then once you get beyond that, staying motivated is really important,

especially if you've never done it before.

Oh, I don't have a job. No one is making me do anything.

Cool, I'm not going to put on pants for a week, because I don't have to.

The first time I freelanced, I didn't leave my house for several weeks on end once.

I only saw the pizza guy.

I got a notice from the city I had to mow my lawn,

and I was like okay, this is a problem.

I was 19, though, so I guess it's okay.

Anyway, so I guess as far as finding stuff

I'm fortunate enough I've never really had to deal with that

just because my first app was so high profile,

and I've worked on a bunch of other things since.

[Hire Sam] [hire.soff.es] I have a page that's hire.soff.es,

and it has all of my rates and my availability,

and people seem to really love how transparent that is,

so I get a ton of stuff.

I even get people emailing me like, "Hey, I can't afford you, but I really love your page,"

and it's like, "Thanks, that's cool."

I think charging the right amount is important,

and I think not to be—I hope this doesn't date this,

but $125 I think is the lowest you should ever go,

even if you've never done anything before ever.

IOS is a really sought-after skill, and not many people can do it

relative to the population or even the people that have iPhone ideas.

You should charge what you're worth, and even if you've never done anything before,

as long as you can push through and finish,

$125 an hour is acceptable,

and I charge $300 now, but I was doing $150 and $200 for a really long time.

I only did $300 recently.

That's really exciting, I think, and will hopefully keep you motivated through the terribleness.

Like, "Well, I'm getting paid enough to push through,"

because clients are terrible.

We can talk about how to pick a good client,

but I guess as far as finding people

you may do an app or two, especially if you've never done one for hire.

Just find someone.

I had a friend, he actually works at Apple now, but there was a local brewery,

and they had all these different beers, and he was like, "Hey, I'll make an app for you to showcase your different beers,

and when you add new ones, I can update the app."

And they're like, "Yeah, that would be awesome.

You're just going to give it to us?"

"Yeah, I like your stuff.

You don't have an app. Let's do it."

And they're like, "Yeah, this is amazing," and he did it all,

and that was one of his first projects.

That kind of thing I think is a good place to start

to practice working with someone and finishing.

Those are really hard things on their own that have nothing to do with development.

If you're not comfortable charging someone,

that's probably a really good place to start is to do something for free

just to put out there more apps in your portfolio,

which will help you either get a full-time job or find more clients.

I have something that you should totally do.

I have on my iPhone my last home screen

is all the apps I've worked on.

When people are like, "Hey, what have you done?" I'm like, "This."

And they're like, "Oh, man, this is crazy. You have a whole home screen."

That's right, and it blows minds.

I had someone offer me a job on the spot when I showed them that.

It was like, "Cool, when can you start?"

I was like, "I don't want to work with you. Thanks though."

Building up your portfolio is really important,

because it blows minds when you show it to people.

Yeah, that was super long winded.

Not at all.

So now you're an indie developer, right?

Well, most of my income comes from freelance,

but I do have a lot of projects I work on.

The dream is to make money on my own on my apps,

but that's probably a ways off.

What prompted you to go into that?

It's something I've always wanted to do, and this is my third time

being self-employed, and I'll usually run out of money

or get angry with dealing with clients,

and I'm like, "Okay, I'll go get a job."

And I was at my last job, and I really liked the people,

and I enjoyed what I was working on, but I was like you know what?

I'm not passionate about making a social network or all this stuff.

I'd rather work on my own products,

and most of my products, or all my products really,

have nothing to do with social networking.

It's more like utilities that solve problems that I have.

That's what I was excited about, and that's not what I was doing,

and I was like, well, there's no reason to sit here and spend all this time working on stuff

that I'm not super passionate about.

I want to give them my best work, and I want to do my best work,

and it's not helping anyone.

I was like I'll leave and do my own stuff,

because that's what I want to do, and there's no reason not to.

I found a client that was a friend

and paid me half down, and I quit and did my thing,

and that was that.

Now I spend a lot of time working on my own projects.

I still spend the majority of my time on freelance, unfortunately,

but hopefully I can start to lower that time as I charge more.

Right.

So your company is called Nothing Magical.

Yeah, sort of.

That was for Cheddar, so I founded It's Nothing Magical, Inc.

It's an actual incorporation in Delaware,

which taxes are the worst, but I'm really bad at that side of things.

So that was what I started, and I was trying to get funding,

investment for Cheddar, and it didn't really work out

since no one is—they're like, "You're just this kid by yourself.

We don't really want to give you all this money,"

and I was like, "All right, that's fair, I guess."

I didn't really go after it,

and mainly the reason is VC's want you to have a billion dollar business,

and Cheddar wasn't a billion dollar business.

It was something that was just making money and people really liked,

and that's not exciting to most investors.

Sadly.

Yes, it's very sad.

But anyway—

Yeah, separate episode, right?

Yeah, anyway, it kind of sat there, and Cheddar paid for Cheddar,

and I took the money from Cheddar, and that's pretty much it.

And now it pays Roon, and a couple other things go through it.

But most of my contracting is me personally.

I don't know, I'm still in a branding crisis,

and I need to figure out what I'm doing, but I have a couple other things.

Some friends and I are talking about starting a company pretty soon,

so I may ditch it altogether and move everything.

I don't know. I've got to figure it out.

So the interesting thing that I'm getting out of this conversation

is you're very open to change and embrace it and are quick to try out different things.

How important is that in this landscape that's changing so quickly?

["How important is it to be able to adapt to change?"]

The plan was I was enrolled in college,

and I was going to go and then got a job at LifeChurch,

and that was Oklahoma, and I grew up in Kentucky,

and I was like, "Cool, I'm going to move to Oklahoma

and not go to college," and my mom is like, "What? How?"

I was like whatever, it shouldn't be that bad.

That's what I did, and it was fine,

and I've made huge changes randomly,

like I'm going to move to Texas and get a job.

I moved to Dallas, and then most recently I guess the most notable change

is I quit my job, got married, and moved to California all in a weekend in August.

That was a good time, but anyway—

oh, this is what I was getting at.

If I had gone to college, that was before iOS came out.

It was the summer before, so I would have finished college,

and they surely wouldn't be teaching iOS at all.

What did you go to college for, if you don't mind me asking?

It was for computer science.

But I almost went back a couple years ago.

I was like, okay, I'll actually go to college, and I was going to go back for philosophy or something like that,

something silly, not computer science.

Going to school for computer science is a waste of time, in my opinion.

But that's another thing.

Had I not done that and gone with the plan,

I would have got out and not really known anything, and that's fine.

I guess that has nothing to do with what I was getting at.

Development changes so quickly.

Here we go.

I think if you're opposed to change you'll be stuck in the past,

and for development that's really bad.

I had a job offer recently from a pretty cool company,

and everyone was awesome, a super great opportunity,

amazing pay, and I met the developers, and they were still on a version of Rails from 5 years ago,

and I was like, "What's the deal with this?"

"Oh, yeah, they're really hard to change."

And I was like, "Yikes! I don't want to work here at all."

Developers that hate change, avoid that.

You have to embrace it.

Stuff changes.

You can't be like you've spent all this time on an iOS, and now 5 years from now we're not using iOS.

I don't see that happening, but whatever it is.

That's a really bad thing, because if you stay in the past,

you'll be left behind,

because consumers don't care what the technology is.

They just want to buy the new thing.

Embracing change is really important,

and not being too married to whatever language or technology you're using.

Once you learn how to code, and especially if you learn 2 different languages,

you've learned how to learn a language.

The first time you're learning basics, and you can't really abstract that away.

But once you learn a second language, you're like, "Oh, I understand an abstract sense of language,

and then I can apply it to these 2."

Then you can learn a language in a weekend, and that's an amazing skill to have,

and it's really important, so change is really good, and you shouldn't fear it as a developer.

I've noticed I think you've started playing with Android as well.

You and Ben were tweeting back and forth.

Yes, I was going to make Cheddar for Android a while ago,

and I've had this a couple times like I'm tired of iOS.

I don't want to do it anymore.

I think Android is going to be terrible, but I'll at least try it out and didn't really get very far.

I started that same chorus way back

and then downloaded Android Studio, and I didn't understand how to adapt the chorus to the stuff,

so Ben was helping me.

He's like, "Isn't this great? Android is so fun!"

I was like, "I waited 30 minutes for the emulator to start. This is not fun."

But I started working on hardware recently.

My biggest project right now is hardware,

and I know nothing about hardware or circuits or any of that stuff,

so it was really hard, and I don't know what I'm doing, but that's great.

That's the place I want to be, because there's only so many times I can hit an API

and show some stuff in a table view.

That's every iOS app ever.

Putting myself in a situation

where I'm over my head and I have to push myself to learn

is really important, and it's easy to get in a spot where you're comfortable,

like okay, I have a really good hang of iOS,

and you're not going to learn anything new for a long time.

You're just going to rinse and repeat all of your apps,

and I don't want to be in that spot, so I'm trying to find things that are—

That challenge you.

Yeah, exactly.

I don't want to take up too much of your time,

so to wrap this up, if you had advice for our students

who have just learned how to code for iOS

and want to do something from there, what's on the top of your mind?

So especially if you've told your friends and family

that I can do iOS now, because you're proud of yourself, which is great,

they're like, "Oh, hold on, I have this idea."

And you're like, "Tell me, what's your idea.

Okay, that's stupid."

Occasionally you get one that's good,

and you're not working on anything, like I hear a lot of people that have just learned

and are like, "Okay, go make something."

That's what you have to do.

"Well, I don't have any ideas."

There's tons of terrible ideas or half good ones.

Just pick something and work on it.

Yeah, working on a terrible idea will still get you practice.

Exactly.

I can't stress enough, going from a bunch of apps on your phone to finishing something

and putting it on the store is a huge step,

and it's not really a development skill.

But having the self-control and discipline to finish the last 10%

is so incredibly important.

I've worked with a lot of people that can't do that,

and it's the people I wouldn't hire again given the option.

So yes, learn how to ship,

because that's really important.

Cool. Thank you very much for taking the time to do this, Sam.

Now what I've learned from this is you have lots to say,

so I think we'll do more episodes in the future

and break it down to freelance and all sorts of different things.

But if anyone has any questions, where can they reach you?

I'm @soffes on Twitter,

and that's probably the best.

Cool. Thank you very much.

Thanks so much.

[? music ?] [Treehouse Friends]