Let's Talk Cocoa

If you take a look at my portfolio, it looks like I do a lot of goofing off, and not a hell of a lot of serious iPhone development. Partly, this is because my contract work either isn’t released yet, or isn’t public on the BigSprocket.com site, and partly it’s because I do fool around a lot with the SDK.

If you’re serious about being an iPhone developer, you need to fool around a bit. And, if you’re hiring an iPhone developer, you need to hire people that do these goofy little apps.A good hiring manager, or a good consulting client, should be able to look at the apps in the portfolio and know two things: 1) these are the spare time projects of someone who likes to write code so much, he actually does it in his spare time, and 2) even when goofing off — especially when goofing off — important things are learned about the environment.

For instance …

• Game Show Sounds and I’mma Let U Finish are trivial little apps. But, they demonstrate some important things: playing sounds, calling JSON web services, and transferring binary files from server to the phone (the latter two to handle that spiffy “more apps by bigsprocket”) widget on the about page.
• Tourneys does the JSON thing, as well as custom per-source table cells, KVC, anti-piracy detection, and more.
• Count Keeper (not released yet, but will be finished any day now), separates UI out into theme packs with declarative positioning, so screens can look completely different from one theme to another.

One contract keeping me busy right now uses all of these things. The knowledge gained in my spare time is coming in damn handy.

If you’re trying to get into iPhone programming, I seriously urge you to go play. Don’t pick a big project that’s over your head. Pick something small and goofy, write it and put it in the store. Then do it again. You won’t get lots of money (unless you’re lucky and your goofy app idea turns out to be a huge hit) but you’ll be rich with knowledge. And when the time comes, the right people will know that, and the job will be waiting for you.