· 4 min read
Catching up while sick, Updates and Reflections
Being a creator is hard when you are sick, especially Podcasting!
When You’re Sick, Just Give In
So one of the things I really want to talk about is how you handle being sick as a creator — specifically, knowing when to just surrender to it. I’ve touched on this before, but I want to approach it from a different angle this time.
Last weekend was rough. I literally could not get out of bed. I think I slept for 14 hours or something like that. I tried to make some notes, jot down some plans — and two seconds later, my brain was just completely mush. I had to give up.
Even staying awake was a challenge, let alone trying to be productive.
My advice? Don’t fight it. When your body is telling you to stop, listen. The quicker you give in and let yourself recover, the faster you’ll get back to doing the things you love. The more you try to push through, the longer it drags on — and I guarantee you, you won’t be doing your best work anyway.
It was frustrating because I’m someone who always wants to be moving forward. But I had to take time off work, rest, and just accept that nothing productive was going to happen for a few days. And honestly? That was the right call.
Job Finder Tracker — New iOS Update
Once I started feeling better, I was able to catch up on a few things — and one of the big ones was releasing a new update to my Job Finder Tracker app on iOS. I’m really pleased with this one, and I want to share the story behind how it came about.
For those of you who are app developers, this might resonate with you. What happened was: I built the Android version of the app and was getting ready to release it — doing screenshots, writing store descriptions, all of that — and I realized the Android version actually had more features than the iOS version. Features that were genuinely good and that I wanted in both versions.
So I had to go back to the iOS version and say, okay, let’s bring these features over.
The key new feature is multiple resume support. Previously, the app only let you create one resume. But think about it — if you’re like me, you might be a software engineer and an engineering manager. A resume tailored for a software engineering role is going to look very different from one tailored for a management position. You should absolutely have more than one resume, and now the app supports that.
You can create as many resumes as you want, attach a specific resume to each job listing, and share them directly from the app. (The sharing feature is temporarily disabled on iOS because there’s a bug I want to fix first — but it’s coming.)
The Android version getting ahead actually pushed me to make the iOS version better, which is kind of a fun way to look at it. And now that this update is out, I can go back to the Android version, finish up the store work, and release it officially. That’s something I’m really excited about.
April Fools Compile Swift Episode
One more thing I wanted to share — Geoff and I couldn’t resist putting out a special April Fools episode of the Compile Swift podcast. We did a mock episode reviewing one of the very early versions of iPhone OS — I think it was around 2006 or so, iPhone OS 3.
It was a lot of fun to record, but also genuinely harder than I expected. We kept having to catch ourselves and say, “Wait — we can’t mention that, it doesn’t exist yet.” The Apple Watch? Doesn’t exist. Modern iPads? Barely a thing. It forced us to really think in the past tense, which turns out to be surprisingly tricky when you’re talking about technology.
I also intentionally degraded the audio to sound like early 2000s streaming internet audio — that slightly sketchy, compressed quality that was just part of the experience back then. Some people might hear it and think it sounds terrible, but that was exactly the point.
If you want to check it out, head over to CompileSwift.com. And yes — it was a joke. Please take it in the spirit it was intended!
Looking Ahead
April is going to be a big month for me. I’ve got a lot of app updates planned, game development work to get back to, and a serious backlog of blog posts I need to catch up on.
Being sick set me back more than I’d like, but I’ve got my plans written down and I’m ready to execute.