Hi Lovely Simplerista,
Yeah, I know. Shocker, right?
But sometimes we (consciously or unconsciously) end up longing for a world that's infinite, unrestricted, where we can be in more than one place at at a time, and never have to worry about such tedious matters as time, money, diet, and exercise.
But alas, that world isn't this world, so we better learn to deal with it.
That's what I just wrote a blog post about.
Interestingly, I realized that my recent life hacking experiment in intermittent fasting (which I'm still doing - today I'm fasting) is at some level about not wanting to deal with a finite world. There's a hope that if I do this, then I won't have to think about what I eat the rest of the week. Which is of course not true. I still think I want to go through with it, just need to be clear on my motivation for doing it.
Beauty in coding
In other news, I'm playing around with developing for iOS. It's just a fun side project for now, but clearly a platform like Simplero would benefit greatly from a cool iOS app. So consider this a warm-up exercise.
Interestingly, something that's held me back from doing that in the past has been the unadulterated ugliness of Objective-C, the official programming language for iOS applications. The language is just so hideous to look at, I haven't been able to make myself do it.
There are alternatives, such as RubyMotion, which I've looked into, but they're unofficial and unsupported by Apple, and so you end up with two opaque places to look for answers and potential sources of bugs, both the iOS frameworks themselves and the additional framework such as RubyMotion.
As soon as Apple announced Swift, I knew I had to start getting my feet wet, and I signed up for a developer account. And here I am, having written my first (still butt-ugly) app using a decidedly still buggy development platform. But it's there.
Many non-programmers don't understand how important beauty and elegance is to developers. It really matters to us that our code is beautiful and elegant, both in how it's conceived and in how it looks, internally (code) as well as externally (user experience). We're craftspeople. We put a lot of pride in our work. It matters that it's something we can be proud of and look at with joy.
New features in Simplero
We just implemented rating of tickets, so you can tell us how you think we did in serving you. It's something that we put very very high on our list of priorities, so knowing how you feel is important to us. Please take the time after our interactions to let us know. You'll find the ability to rate in your support bar.
People are starting to use our new Zapier integration, and seem to be liking it.
Still working on new marketing site, onboarding, and a few new things coming up.
Random fun stuff from around the interwebs
I got addicted to Two Dots and finished all currently existing 135 level. Whatever you do, DON'T START PLAYING TWO DOTS. IT WILL STEAL YOUR LIFE! You have been warned.
Speaking of beautiful things, this identity design work for the new Russ & Daugthers café is just gorgeous. The café is just on the next street from where I live. I have to go visit and try it out. Tomorrow, when I'm not fasting.
Speaking of my neighborhood, this building had suddenly shot up right behind the Chrysler building when seen from our windows while we were away in Denmark from two months. Came back, looked out the window, and were like "wait a minute, that building didn't used to be there, did it?". Nope, it didn't. Will be the second tallest building in Manhattan when it's completed. Expect to sell the apartments for a total of $2bn. Yowza!
I'm going to Burning Man in a few weeks. Still both psyched and scared. Seems like a crazy idea. Wait, you say I have to bring all the water that I need to consume in an entire week. From New York to Nevada? Okay. Anyway, came across this neat map. I'll be in the Disco Chateau camp. See if you can find it. And while we're on the topic, check out this drone video from last year's Burning Man. Fascinating!
Have a beautiful week.
Lots of love,
-Calvin