Totally A Thing

I worked on Google’s ads serving infrastructure as a software engineer at their Mountain View, California HQ from 2007-2009. The system was complex, and included two AI clusters involved in predicting the best ads to show against a given search result.

Google also had a very innovative market for ads, where advertisers could bid for words that folks searching on Google had used in their search terms. AI actually works really well in tandem with search.

One thing advertisers want to know is what their products are appearing in response to: its called targeting. Bu...

Data centres for AI use huge amounts of electricity and cooling water. But there’s folks that want to muddy the waters about these facts, and so they are using AI to generate junk science. As I say in the video quibbling over water that is “consumed” versus “withdrawn” is pointless argumentation used by AI boosters to cloud the facts. When climate change denialists wanted to attack clean energy initiatives they took aim at Toyota’s Prius hybrid saying the Sherman-tank-like Humvee was “cleaner”, and they used a junk science report as the vehicle. Of course the truth is not that the Pri...

Hey all, I’ve looked better and felt better! But after getting out of hospital I just wanted to show that I am on the mend, and will be back writing in the coming days.

Hospital stays are not fun, and for 7 days involving rigors and being on a drip was awful. But I’m back, and getting healthy again.

Also I have a qualification that I’ve been studying towards (to allow me to teach in Australia, in tech) and that has meant doing practical exams that also took up some of my very little...

Working through a series by Lesser Dog Tutorials on how to make a LucasArts style point and click adventure in Blueprints, I have instead of using Blueprints I have been translating everything into C++, and it’s so much fun.

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Feels like doing a crossword and a half-dozen other fun puzzles besides. Today’s solution found was uncovering how Unreal dispatches Interfaces when they’re implemented in C++, and overridden in a Blue...

I have been struggling to write this article, and figure out what to do with this cartoon / diagram I made about the alleged use of stolen books by AI companies for weeks now. The sheer scale and brazen bullying greed of these guys just astonishes me.

I believe startups and technology have the ability for great good. But it’s being used to enrich the most powerful at the expense of the little guy.

This diagram sums it up in one image. See my video for an explainer.

References

Articles I re...

Engineers love to deal in absolutes. We are trained for it, when we study mathematics, electronics and disciplines like finite element analysis or software development at University. It seems to us like everything in the world can be reduced to ones-and-zeroes, true and false.

Business is not like that. You have to prioritise. It is a constant balancing act. Every time you choose to execute on an initiative, there is an opportunity cost. The time you spent on those cool infrastructure as code scripts is time you did not spend delivering the incremental login feature that your...

Why?

In my previous talks on how to build an app I’ve discussed source control briefly. Github, owned by Microsoft, is probably the most popular cloud service for source control. OK, but how does that help me?

If your app based startup is going great, then your team will be implementing product features and code for that will be going into your source control system many times a day.

But what about if something is going wrong? How can you check up on that? Do you wait for your engineering team to te...

Google’s AI Preview is driving me insane!

I just want web pages!

Instead when I type a search, what happens? It thinks for a moment or two, then produces this bargain basement guess, summarised from whatever blended together soup of opinions it found on the web.

I don’t want that! I never asked for that!!

When I’m researching for my writing I need the actual facts. Many topics are highly dependent on the source.

Google, why do you grind off the serial numbers and sell me this c...

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There’s some really great apps in the App Store and Google play store!

When I was consulting, building apps for people in business, they’d show me Augmented Reality apps like Pokemon Go, or the Uber app with its live location tracking and ask “Can I get an app like that for my business?”

Welcome to the second post in my series on team dynamics. Last time I talked about communication and how it’s the best bang for your buck when it comes to solving issues that crop up in your app based start up. 

I talked about how teams at any given time have a set level of competency which is not quickly changed. And I went on to cover how trying to motivate your team with pep talks, or worse brow beating doesn’t get to the root of actual problems.

In the previous lecture, I prese...

This is the fifth post in my series how to build an app. We’ve already covered how to get your team together, shape up a product and build an app. But when that app and our team is working together as a business what does it look like?

Milestone Release. Are We Done?

When the team has been pushing for a milestone, and it comes to release, there's pressure to ramp up marketing and cut development costs.

In an app startup development costs, engineering costs in particular are one of the biggest. Bu...

Imagine the throughput of your team is defined by this triangle - in this model the sides remain in constant proportion.

Once you have hired someone competence is fixed. Lets assume you have a team and you want to make the best of them.

Motivation - the mistake some leaders make is thinking what they have to do to get their team producing output is to crank up the motivation. Introduce crunch time, do pep talks.

But in my experience its the communication which winds up being the restricting factor MOST often. If...

In this episode the rubber hits the road and our app is being put to the test. Will it succeed or fail? To get to this point an appreneur — either an app-based startup, or an existing business creating an app — should already have things sorted, as laid out in previous episodes:

* Business plan with fixed and growing costs, unique value and revenue

* Product tested by selling value via a duct-taped together MVP

* A basic understanding of what apps are, the risks and how to avoid them

Money is one measure of succ...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com

In part 1 I looked at the Product Owner and UX Designer. I’m going to jump straight in to the next specialist in the team — the engineering manager. Related roles are team lead, project manager or scrum master. Their job is to resolve problems that may stand in the way of the success of their developers, UX designer and product owner. This person is an …

This is a tie-in for my series on How to Build an App. Please checkout the other posts in that series, but especially the one on App Startup Canvas.

Use the App Startup canvas to define the ground zero for your app development efforts: your team, your expertise, your plan to get revenue that will offset costs.

Listen to the above to understand some important takeaways:

* Your app is at the end of the day a channel - its part of a business

* Vanity metrics don’t beat customers - the on...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com

The traps that end many app startups are covered in this talk as they apply to how you and your team work to build your app. I’ll talk about the cycles, milestones and how those fit with launches. Then I cover the role of two critical professionals in the app development team: the UX Designer and Product Owner.

Resources: the cycle index card I refer to …

Hey, I have a great idea for an app! Can you tell me, just roughly is fine, how much would it cost?

This question was one I fielded literally hundreds of times in the decade or so I was doing mobile app development in startup co-working spaces, after quit Google and Nokia to run my own app consulting business.

The number one thing I that stopped more than half of these starry-eyed appreneurs from going ahead was they had no business plan. Even if you’re trying for some sort of social enterprise, you need to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com

Apps are part of the fabric of the Internet

Apps seem simple when you look at them! But we know companies like Facebook and Google; Twitter and Snapchat have hundreds, even thousands of people working on apps.

Get the benefit of 20 years of experience in mobile development to understand the real factors that should play into your choices about which platform to build your startup’s mobile app on.

This is a free episode! Enjoy. If you get something out of this one, or on hearing my background want to find out what else I have in store on tech, culture, apps and startups then definitely subscribe - you get a free unlock for my “How to Build an App” series when you do.

You have limited runway, wrong decisions could be very c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit totallyathing.substack.com

Have you ever wondered what goes into building an app? What different kinds of apps are there? How can I get an app built?

Follow this series of blog posts (indexed below) to find out the answers to these questions and all your other questions about building mobile apps.

I’m Sarah Smith and I have been working with apps for over 20 years. I worked for Goo…

In my career of mobile app engineering I have been asked this question a lot.

“How much is a mobile app?”

Well, the question you should be asking is “How much could it cost if you try to do it on the cheap?”

When you partner up to build a mobile app for your business, you expect that it will be simple to get the features you need for your app to succeed. These days even if your app is part of some larger business, or if its an “appreneur” play in its own right, y...