Devs for Devs: You Are Valuable, Act Like It.
Hello! 👋 We’re happy to welcome Manuel Cazalla Colmenero as our guest author. Manuel is an iOS developer working with Swift, SwiftUI, and UIKit, with hands-on experience building and maintaining production applications. Beyond his professional work, Manuel is also an indie developer who has taken two of his own apps all the way from idea to App Store. That journey has given him practical experience beyond coding, from architecture and persistence to testing, localization, monetization, App Store review, and actually shipping a product to users. P.S. You can follow Manuel and his iOS development journey on LinkedIn and GitHub.
Hey! 👋 Some of you know me, but for those who don’t, I’m Jacob, a husband and father of 5 kids under 10 years old, whom we homeschool. One of our kids has a rare medical condition that consumes a lot of our time, and it’s unfortunately not uncommon for us to spend weeks or months in the hospital with him. We live out in the sticks in Wisconsin, trying to farm a bit. We’re better with animals than plants so far. We’ve had sheep, goats, and currently lots of chickens. We rest on Saturdays, spend our days at church on Sundays, and I run a Bible study on Monday nights that usually lasts until midnight. Aside from all that, I spend much of my time helping developers make more money: I’m working on the SDKs at RevenueCat full-time. So… I’m what you might call a “busy” guy. Regardless, this year I've shipped 2 iOS apps (Noah Weather & Whoya) and 1 SaaS tool (BnbPhotoFactory). All are good-quality apps, and one is grossing a few thousand dollars a month. You may wonder how I have the time to build. As you could probably guess, I don’t have much time. I have to squeeze it in, usually when I’d rather be sleeping. And many times, it’s really easy to put off working on my own apps and just get some sleep… A lot of times I do. AI has certainly helped with velocity, but it’s not a silver bullet. There are things that require my mind and my time. I don’t want to ship slop. I’m still a craftsman, and that means I need to make time. So how do you do that? How do you make the time? I’m going to answer that, maybe in a more roundabout way than is typical. To give you some breadcrumbs, I want you to take away 3 things from this article:
The Battle of the MindAs a parent, time seems to fly by. My oldest is halfway to adulthood, but it feels like a month ago I was rocking her to sleep on my shoulder and changing her diapers all the time. And now, having a child with a severe medical condition, I realize how precious life is. How precious my time is. Life is not like Prince of Persia or Click, where I could rewind and undo things. I can’t go backwards and change or relive anything. When I trade my time, it’s a permanent trade. That time is gone. Forever. So… What am I willing to trade that time for? Not much, honestly. We cut a lot out of our lives. We don’t watch TV or play video games anymore. We’re not on most social media platforms. We intentionally avoid the fearmongering media outlets. We aren’t willingly being ignorant, we pick and choose how and where we consume our information. We don’t allow those kinds of distractions into our lives, because we don’t want to waste our time. We also cut out consumer debt. We spent years paying off the loans and credit cards, and cut them up. The payments on the debt nagged at my thoughts. They were stealing my peace and made it harder to be flexible with our lives. So we cut that out too. We don’t even have the desire to spend the mental energy playing the game for points. I don’t care about a few hundred extra bucks a year. The cost, my mental energy, is not worth it. We are trying to have free minds and therefore free lives. To get there, we had to choose that our lives were more valuable than the TV and the games. That peace of mind was more valuable than having the newest things and a credit card statement. You may not need to go to the same lengths as we did. But what you certainly need to do is make it easy to choose. You have to do the work up front to know how valuable your life is and what your values are. It becomes easy to choose how to trade your time when you know your value. But if you don’t know the value of your time, it’s easy to allow all sorts of things to fill it. How I ChooseWhen you’re as busy as I am, you don’t have much time to trade on projects. At that point, it can be discouraging. You have all kinds of ideas! And with AI, it’s a lot easier to make them reality! But you still have to prioritize what is most important. And that means, at least for me, there’s not much time to build. If I choose to work on an idea that has potential but I’m not that fired up about it, I have a hard time committing my time to it. I also struggle to balance more than one idea at once. This is especially true if I’m excited about all of the ideas I’m trying to work on simultaneously. So what I do is focus on just one app at a time. If there’s one that’s clearly urgent, like there’s money on the table, that one wins. But other than that, it’s whatever I’m most excited about. Apps that I want to build for ME or my family. It’s not easy to trade sleep for some random money-making idea. But it is SO EASY to trade it for an app I’m passionate about, because money is just a nice bonus. If you’re married (or dating), I would also choose an idea your other half is interested in. Showing off what you worked on to an unimpressed audience is a total momentum killer. But showing off an app you’re both excited about fuels the flames. It works with friends too, but it’s not the same. I also generally like to build for me first. When an app idea is solid enough that I think others would want it, I test that theory. I get it polished a bit, push it to TestFlight, invite some people, and see if it’s worth pursuing. If there’s enough interest, I’ll commit to the v1 feature set and polish, and go from there. Wrapping It UpSo, if you’re anything like me and you don’t have much time to spend on things, here’s my advice. Take stock of what you spend your time on and evaluate whether it matches your values. Does the way you spend your time show that you value your faith, yourself, and your family? Cut out anything that competes with your values. Do the hard work now, because it’s so much easier to walk and run when you don’t have weights around your ankles. Then build from a place of excitement and passion! It’s a fun way to be. My AppsIn the introduction, I mentioned things I’ve shipped this year outside of work. They are:
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