Day 1: Out of the Woods
Monday, July 14, 2025
After two months of wandering, I’m finally ready to get out of the woods. I’ve been working on my first iOS app in a while, and my whole motivation for the app comes from me wanting to finally do all the things I never could when I had a full-time job. And while I’m still looking for a full-time job, applying is just as awful as you hear about, I want to be sure I utilize the small amount of freedom I now have by completing the things I’ve always wanted to accomplish. One of the biggest things I wanted to accomplish after I left my previous job was to publish a new iOS app to help people stay focused on their hobbies.
To do that successfully, I want to start posting daily about my progress towards accomplishing that goal. Some days it is going to be very short since I maybe didn’t do a whole lot of work on my app. However, my hope is that by posting daily I will stay on top of the project and keep it moving towards the finish line.
A big inspiration for me to do daily logs is David Smith’s amazing Design Diary series he is writing as he works through redesigning his apps for iOS 26. The second inspiration was Brent Simmon’s Vesper Sync Diary from 2013/2014 which I had followed at the time religiously and loved every little update. I think it is important to share progress on large scale-projects publicly to not only record them for others to possibly learn from, but to keep a trail of the hard work you have put into your own projects.
The final big reason I want to do this is to get back to posting regularly to my Micro.blog site. Manton’s book and podcast Core Intuition were a huge inspiration for me to finally start to use Micro.blog and join in the community of bloggers trying to reclaim a small portion of the internet that the big social media companies have stolen. As I’ve started to post more on TikTok and other social media platforms, I just get the constant feeling that I’m missing out on contributing that same sort of content on more open and freely available avenues.
Today is day 1 of hopefully many more days!
A quick note: I’m hoping to give each day some sort of unique title, possibly Lord of the Rings inspired…but let’s see how long I manage to keep to this!