TeeJay942's comments

TeeJay942 | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2017)

  Location: Chicago, IL
  Remote: Yes, preferred
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: iOS, Swift, Xcode, Sketch, Git
  Résumé/CV: Will provide upon email request
  Email: tcjohns87 (at) gmail (dot) com
I'm an iOS developer with over 2.5 years of experience in Swift. I began my career as a CPA and spent 5 years working in fast-paced, deadline-driven environments at 2 of the large public accounting firms (last promotion was to manager).

As a large part of my transition to iOS development, I built the iOS app Routinist, which helps you achieve goals and build habits by scheduling them into your daily routines. Since April 2016, Routinist has 70k downloads, 720k sessions, and 7.5k monthly active users. Through the process of building this app and 33 App Store releases, I’ve learned much about coding, user experience, design, marketing, and business.

TeeJay942 | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2017)

Location: Chicago, IL

Remote: Yes, preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Swift, iOS, Sketch

Résumé/CV: Will provide upon email request

Email: [email protected]

I built the iOS app, Routinist, which helps you achieve goals and build habits by scheduling them into your daily routines. Routinist has over 60k downloads and 600k sessions.

I am an iOS developer with 2.5 years experience in Swift and have executed all facets of the iOS development lifecycle from conception to launch, debugging, customer service, etc. I approach my work with consideration to the impact it will have on customers, coworkers, and the success of the business overall.

Prior to iOS development, I worked as a CPA in fast-paced environments and developed skills that are useful in app development including communication, team, interpersonal, management, organization, time management, and math/logic skills.

TeeJay942 | 8 years ago | on: Time Well Spent

I love Tristan's philosophy that the purpose of technology should be to help us live deliberate lives and not distract us endlessly and consume our attention by taking advantage of our evolutionary shortcomings (e.g., resistance to change, fear of missing out, defaulting to whatever is easiest like scrolling a feed, providing variable rewards, etc.).

Sam Harris has a great podcast with Tristan here: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-is-technology-do...

TeeJay942 | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: What can I buy for under $50 that will most dramatically improve my life

Getting a dog is a great idea (especially from a shelter), but I just want to set realistic cost expectations here.

My fiance volunteers for PAWS and it is typically a minimum of $350 in fees to leave with a dog. Also, dog food can add up (the dog we recently adopted needs grain-free food due to an allergy) so it's about $750 a year for a 28 lb dog (I would say minimum of $300 for cheaper food). Then you should take your pet in once a year to the vet and get heartworm, flea & tick medicine, etc (another min. $350 a year). And you'll probably want to get your dog a doggy bed, collar, leash, treats, etc. Obviously anyone can cut out or short cut some of these expenses, but this should be the minimum spend expectation in my fiance's opinion.

TeeJay942 | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: How much of your time at work do you spend not working?

>"The symptoms I've experienced are... and poor time management."

I built a morning and evening routine app (Routinist) to help professionals schedule habits/goals into their days. I did not have ADHD in mind when I built it, but around 1/3 of the positive feedback I get through emails / reviews has some form "I have ADHD and this helps me".

TeeJay942 | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Tell us about your S2017 startup

I don't journal, but from what I understand, products like the 5-minute journal ask you to journal some things you are thankful for, something positive/good that happened today, what you could have done better, etc.

This exercise seems more about focusing your day/priorities, clearing your thoughts and taking some time to feel some good vibes. It's not about remembering 100% of your life.

Yeah - If I'm going to look back on life later on at things, it will be 100x in favor of things like my kid's photos/videos vs words I spoke that were transcribed to text.

TeeJay942 | 9 years ago | on: After Years of Challenges, Foursquare Has Found Its Purpose, and Profits

The article says "Foursquare is on the path to $100 million in revenue", so they might be nowhere nearly that level. But I would think their largest costs are salary and servers.

Like most startups building a mass of users (e.g. Twitter), they have likely been optimizing for growth as quickly as possible. Which means spending all revenue/investment on getting customers, etc. and delaying focus on turning a profit until some future time (e.g., as the acceleration of growth slows).

TeeJay942 | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Tell us about your S2017 startup

"We want to help people stop forgetting 90% of their lives."

I also saw this tagline or similar on PH, and I got to say I'm not a fan. If you look at everyday on it's own, for most of us, it's pretty boring stuff. Why would I want a record of that? If something hugely important happens, sure maybe I'll want to be able to access that memory / my thoughts at that time in the future.

But 10 years (let alone 50) from now, I might not even know what year big events happened. And so I'll be digging through maybe 100s of hours of recordings/text if I'm looking for a specific event.

There's definitely some product in this space that could be great, but I don't think 60 second recordings is it, especially without some way to filter through the boring crap. I imagine looking through my old calendar would be more helpful than my 60 seconds of nightly drivel.

TeeJay942 | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: YC Startup School Weekly Update

I think FB focuses it's business around increasing time in app per user (or they at least track this). Many to-do list apps track tasks completed.

I would say for any completely free games that do well b/c they advertise, optimizing for time in app and # of clicks on ads is clearly very important metrics.

I built an app that helps you build habits by scheduling them into your daily morning/evening routines. Part of that routine building process is assigning time for each action (e.g. exercise for 30 minutes). So my KPI is minutes completed.

It's a productivity app so it seemed foolish to me to try to keep people in my app for longer. I even encourage users to complete their routines through actionable notifications (i.e. without opening the app).

TeeJay942 | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's a good app for grocery management?

Anylist was made for this. It's a YC funded company, but it's great because the sync is perfected, it has a calendar meal plan, recipe lists, those recipe lists can be populated from most recipe websites, works great on mobile and desktop, etc.

The biggest reason I used this over Wunderlist (which also has perfect sync) is there is no way to make two separate lists in Wunderlist and then combine them. This is important because like me you might try to make a separate list for a separate recipe, but it's a no go unless you are making and modifying one grocery list anew for each trip.

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