How it started
The price of jet fuel went up, and my client, a UK airport based one, decided that the thing to do about it was to end my contract early. I have had worse news. I have had it delivered worse, too.
If you are going to be let go, be let go for a reason so magnificently out of your hands that nobody can even pretend it was about your work.
How it felt
Relief, mostly. That surprised me a little, and it should not have.
I had a folder of my own projects that had been “nearly there” for somewhere between one and eleven years, depending on the project. Every one of them was waiting for a weekend that kept being spent on somebody else’s sprint. I had been meaning to clear that backlog for ages, in the way that people mean to sort out the loft. Somebody had now made the decision for me and, better still, had made it in a way that came with a summer attached.
Indie dev for the summer.
What actually came out of it
More than I expected, which I put down entirely to the difference between four hours on a Sunday and a working day that belongs to you.
- Bus Watch, twice. A London bus app for iPhone and Apple Watch, then the whole thing again in Kotlin and Compose for Android. There is a post about the iOS one and the Android port, the second of which is mostly about alarms and is more interesting than that sounds.
- Vonatkém shipped. A live map of Hungarian trains, with a Live Activity that turns your lock screen into a departure board for the one you are actually waiting for. It has a small backend of its own, which is how I discovered that I enjoy writing servers considerably more than I enjoy operating them.
- PhotoWash rebuilt. An old app of mine, dragged into SwiftUI, given background scanning, a sense of how confident it is, and several more languages than it had in the spring.
- The masters degree. Still struggling to catch up, as I was so far behind thanks to work and personal circumstances, but doing my best.
- This blog, rebuilt on Toucan, a static site generator written in server side Swift, which meant the tooling stopped being a reason not to write. You are reading the evidence.
Four store listings, screenshots, privacy policies, release notes and all the unglamorous paperwork that surrounds a shipped app.
Then there is the promotion, which is the part nobody warns you about and I would happily never do again. App ads are gruelling, and the alternative to paying for them is posting about your own work several times a week, forever. I run an X account and an Instagram account purely out of necessity. Neither is a hobby. Both are a tax on shipping something on your own.
What I learned about working for myself
Nobody interrupts you, which is wonderful for about a week and then becomes its own problem, because nobody interrupts you.
I also learned, again, that finishing is a separate skill from building. The last ten per cent of an app is a different job with the same tools, and it is the job that decides whether anything you did in the first ninety per cent ever meets eyes.
As for what the App Store paid me for all this: let us call it a modest contribution towards the coffee, and move swiftly on.
The narrowboat, and the gym that did not happen
The summer also acquired a hobby, which is that I now have a narrowboat.
This has been excellent for my life and mixed for my output. Canals run at four miles an hour, which is the correct speed for thinking about an app and a terrible speed for getting anywhere. A boat is also a machine with opinions, and it expresses them on weekday afternoons. It has, inevitably, become software: I am building a web app for the narrowboating community, and home automation for the boat itself, because a floating home with a battery bank and no dashboard is a problem I was never going to leave alone.
The gym was in the original plan. It featured prominently in the announcement. I am still fat, but at least less stressed and with more apps.
Where it leaves me
Looking, but pickier.
That is the part I did not expect. I am open to the right contract and considerably less interested in the wrong one, having now seen exactly what gets built when nobody schedules a two hour meeting about it.
The apps carry on either way.
Header photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Pexels.
