Letting Go…

Many people outside of the software development field (and some people in the field) may have the incorrect view that computer code is just cold, hard text written only to make a computer do something. While that may technically be correct, for people who genuinely enjoy coding the application code can be a warm, even living, being, constantly evolving over time to provide the user with an elegant means of accomplishing a task. When programming, I don’t think of myself necessarily as pumping out code. It’s more of a massaging of the project to get it to do something just right, and then a final smoothing of the bugs or gaps in the functionality to make it work perfectly.

Because of this almost art-like view of my career, it’s often difficult to stop working on a project. Then when you consider how many hundreds or thousands of hours you’ve invested in a project, walking away becomes next to impossible. However, I’ve reached a time in my career where I have decided to do just that.

//
// MyWeatherAppDelegate.h
// MyWeather
//
// Created by Mike Piatek-Jimenez on 3/26/08.
//

Above is a copy of the code header for the first file to kick off the MyWeather Mobile project. March 26th, 2008: 4 months before the App Store opened, and only a few weeks after Apple released the iPhone SDK. After working with the team at Weather Central for almost 11 months, I’ve decided it’s time for me to let the project go. The reason for parting ways is not that I don’t enjoy working on the project. It’s more of a re-evaluation of priorities.

The thing is, I have a lot of ideas both for continuing my current Gaucho Software products, as well as ideas for entirely new projects I would like to bring to market. While consulting for the past 4 years, I keep finding myself looking back trying to figure out why I’m not able to be productive on my own apps. Sometimes I will go months without touching any Gaucho Software projects. I spent a good amount of time over the holidays reflecting on this problem, and I’ve determined that in order for me to continue working on Gaucho Software products in any productive form, continuing my consulting work just isn’t an option. So with Gaucho Software turning 5 years old this April 1st, I’ve decided to focus entirely on in-house apps from this point forward.

So with that, I hand over the reigns. Version 1.3 has already been uploaded to the App Store and is pending approval. Version 1.4 code is done and we are just waiting for some back-end features to be finished before the release next month. The team at Weather Central have been a joy to work with. Having the graphics, code, and data all merge together in an iPhone app is not a trivial task, but with this team it worked like magic. Graphics were readily available; the data pipes were overflowing; and all that was left was to write the code and bring it all together. I wish them the best of luck in continuing project development of the MyWeather Mobile application, as well as any other projects they decide to bring to the iPhone platform in the future…