I switched from Sencha Touch to Corona SDK for the latest app/game I'm working on. The Corona SDK is $349/year to build for the iOS app store and Android Market. The art has cost ~$200 so far.  I was complaining to Sergei about how I hate having to pay over $500 when I don’t even know if my little app will make any money.

He said, "$500 -- not bad. For hands-on training with a cross-platform mobile development framework."

I started thinking about that, and I like Sergei's perspective. Saying that I'm getting "training" implies that someone is teaching me, though, but I guess one could argue that the entire Corona SDK community is teaching me (through API docs and forum posts), and I'm teaching myself the rest.

Yeah, it's a little expensive (for an individual developer in his spare time) to develop this mobile app, not knowing whether it will be a success or not, but, for the cost of one semester at a local community college, I'm getting a lot of experience with stuff that I've never had the opportunity to play with as a .NET developer, and at the end of the day, it will help me build better apps.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/.net-interview-preparation/id464280545

This is my first app for iOS, so I'm a bit teary eyed.

For those just coming to the site, there's an Android version too.

The app was written with PhoneGap and Sencha Touch.

Dr. Schwartz uses a lot of terminology that was probably hip with the youngsters of that time, and it makes for a very amusing read.  He talks about the top salesman at the company making a whopping $25,000/year, while the other salesmen are only making $5,000. There is a lot of stuff like that in there.

The title of this post is referring to a quote from the book:

“Being licked is valuable if we learn from it.”

I know you probably came here thinking this was going to be a post about a programmer getting a good ol’ fashioned tongue bath (but really -- why would you want to read about that?), but I urge you to stick around anyway.

Dr. Schwartz is using the term “licked” to mean “beaten up” or “defeated.”  And I agree that there truly is value in being beaten, as long as you learn why you were beaten and keep trying your best.

One of my favorite quotes is by Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, who said:

“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

I like that quote because I’ve at least tripled mine. Now let me pull back the curtain on my personal projects...

I wrote and self-published a book called Shove It FizzBuzz! How to Find and Land a .NET Development Job. I originally tried to sell it as part of a resource kit that included the ebook, a resume template, and interview preparation software for Windows.

Let me tell you -- it was not a success.

I had no idea how much to charge for something like that. I tried $49, then $39, then $29, then $199 (as an experiment -- raising the price to raise perceived value at a friend’s suggestion). I dropped the price to $19, then finally $9.  I think I sold around 12 of them in a year at those various prices. (None at $199.)  My only marketing was the occasional blog post and google ads, and most of the time I paid more out in google ads than I made in that month.

It was an extremely humbling experience for me. I had assumed that what I had created was great stuff, and that everyone would want it. (I still believe it’s great, but I know now that not everyone wants it.)

So, for a time, I gave up. I was discouraged. Then I started reading The Magic of Thinking Big, and a few other motivational books - Crush It by Gary Vee, The Traveller’s Gift by Andy Andrews, and I don’t know what happened, but a switch flipped inside me, and suddenly that fire in my belly was back, and now I can’t put it out.

I edited and rewrote portions of my book, added some new content, then self-published it through Createspace.com so that people could buy a physical paperback copy of the book if they wanted (it had been requested). I took the time to format it for the Kindle and used kdp.amazon.com to put it up for sale on amazon.com. I formatted it for the Nook (ePub) and used Smashwords to put it up on barnes & noble and some other sites.

I created a mobile version of my Interview Preparation software using PhoneGap and Sencha Touch, leveraging my existing web development skills so I could get it out more quickly.

I changed my site to more effectively push my new products.

And now I sit back and relax as the UPS guy delivers boxes full of money to my door.

Oh wait -- that hasn’t happened.

Here’s the reality of what has happened though. I sold 12 resource kits the first year. I’ve sold 24 paperback books since May 29th of this year through Createspace alone. It’s still not great, but that’s twice as many as I sold the entire first year! I’ve sold 33 copies of the Kindle edition in the same time frame, and 4 copies through Smashwords (which means it might have come from barnes & noble or one of the other stores that offer it in ePub format).

My .NET Interview Prep app is only on the Android Market right now (it is finally “Waiting for Review” in the App store). It’s been in the Android Market since approximately August 1st, so it’s been about a month and a half, and it’s been purchased 55 times already. The free “lite” version with fewer questions was released on August 20th, and it’s been downloaded over 700 times.

Those are the facts. If you add all that up, factoring in the low cost of the Kindle version of the book and the mobile app, it’s not a lot of money, but I’m fine with that. It’s still a lot better than it was last year, and I’ve learned a lot from the licking I got. More importantly, I know there is still more to learn.

If you’re not failing regularly, you probably aren’t pushing yourself to experiment with new things. You don’t need to make big mistakes to learn from them; you can learn something from a simple syntax error in a line of code. I don’t know how often I’ve run into what seemed like a minor bug that turned into a much larger issue requiring a ton of research to figure out. I may have felt like my ass was kicked, but I also learned something; probably about regular expressions, as they quite often crane kick me into oblivion.

It's a great set of basic questions, and it's completely free, so please download it today!

It's currently only available for Android, but the iPhone will be available as soon as I get the appropriate paperwork to Apple.

Download now for free from the Android Market:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.downcastsystems.dotnetinterviewpreplite

I'm very excited about this. It's my first mobile app, and I'm proud of the UI design and the content.

For those who are interested, it was developed with PhoneGap and Sencha Touch.

Here's the blurb that'll be posted to the front page of the site soon:

Prepare for your interview anywhere!

The definitive mobile app for preparing for a .NET interview has been released! It's a flash card based app with questions and answers (with full explanations). Many questions came from How to Find and Land a Microsoft .NET Development Job, but there are probably 75 or so new questions/answers not listed in the book. There are over 200 questions in all.

Buy it now for your Android 2.1+ devices
(iPhone/iPad versions coming really, really soon, so stay tuned.)

What are your three biggest weaknesses?

My brother-in-law was applying for a pilot job last week, and although he's got a copy of my book, he called me for more specific advice. He knew they were going to ask him about three of his weaknesses, and he wasn't sure what to say.

This is the advice I gave to him: Think about what the potential employer will say negatively about you after you leave. I asked him, "What are your weaknesses?" Tell them the truth, but here's the kicker: address the issues!

For my brother-in-law, I told him he could say something like this: "One of my weaknesses is that I don't have as much flight time as some of these other guys, but I'm going up whenever I can to get more. Although I haven't had that many jobs, the ones I've had have been fairly difficult, like flying tourists through the grand canyon, and I learned a lot from that experience. Between flights, I practice with Flight Simulator to keep myself current."

He did that in his interview, and they told him it was a great answer. He got the job. How can a developer apply the same technique to a job interview? Address your weaknesses in the same way:

"One of my weaknesses is that I don't know as much about JavaScript as I'd like. I recently bought Douglas Crockford's book JavaScript: The Good Parts, and I've been going through it to learn more. Another weakness is that I sometimes struggle with time and task management. I've been working on that as well. I'm learning the Getting To Done system now. Another weakness of mine, professionally, is that I don't have a Microsoft Certification yet, but I'm actively pursuing it at the moment, and I expect to be at least an MCTS by the end of the year."

There are many weaknesses you can list, and then address:

• Lack of a bachelor's degree, but you've been researching online universities as a potential option to finish your studies.
• Lack of experience with [specific technology], but you've recently started going through some video tutorials on it in your spare time.
• Haven't had a chance to get involved with any open source projects because you've been so busy with your own personal projects.

Surely you can see the formula by now. List the weakness, then what you're doing to correct it. It's the perfect way to turn the weakness question into a positive for you.

While supplies last, I'm going to give away paperback copies of my book How to Find and Land a Microsoft .NET Development Job to computer science teachers for free.

If you teach software development at a high school, college, university, or whatever, just contact me and send me your name and mailing address (preferably your school/university mailing address), and I'll send you a book!  (U.S. addresses only.)

Hurry because I only have limited quantities available!

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble

In case you missed the last post, it's also available for Kindle, and now also other eBook readers.

US version:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZR17FG

UK version:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZR17FG

German version (not translated into German, though; just available on the German version of Amazon):
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004ZR17FG

I hope you like the new format and rewritten content. I'm working on getting a hard copy (paperback) version as well. I'll announce that when it's available.

I was having some trouble getting things to work until I watched this “Getting Started” video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzcIcyBYJMA

Here’s a pretty awesome online book to teach you how to do it:
http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449383268/

Because it’s all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can use Javascript frameworks like jQuery, and then you can use plugins like jqTouch:
http://jqtouch.com/

You can also create apps for Blackberry, Symbian, and Palm the same way… I imagine it’s only a matter of time before Windows Phone 7 is supported. It will require Microsoft to release a better quality web browser on the phone that better supports HTML5 and CSS3. The current one is supposedly “somewhere between IE7 and IE8.”