#227: Pivotal

Lightly edited from the audio for readability: filler words and false starts removed.

00:00 I started Developing Perspective 15 years ago, did it for four years by myself, and then did 10 years of Under the Radar with Marco Arment, and then we've been sort of off for about a year, and it felt like something I should do again.

00:18 I don't really know what form this will take or what the schedule or whatever would be, but it feels like I have something to say that I think would be helpful, and at least I hope it would be. And so I figured I'd bring it back, and we'll see how this goes.

00:36 Because we live at a really funny time to be an indie app developer. I think it's coming up on the 18th anniversary of my first app being launched on the App Store in a couple weeks. And in that time, an entire adult's life, a lot has changed. A lot of things are different, and we've gone through many cycles of different, but it feels like the pace and the style of the changes are becoming even more significant, more different, more "wow, that's a lot" kind of feelings.

01:16 And I imagine I'm not alone in this feeling. I'm not alone in it feeling like a kind of overwhelming, a little bit mad, but also kind of exciting and also kind of...you have this really interesting kind of energy about the world right now in the iOS development world, because so many things about the ways that we do our job have changed that are different now than they were before.

01:47 I spent the last 25 years working on becoming a really good professional programmer, and increasingly I find I don't really need to be a professional programmer. I need to design products, I need to build things using the skills that I have and the sort of expertise I've built up over the last 18 years, but I don't need to program very much, and that's really weird.

02:10 And that's weird both at a product level, a business level and a personal level. It's weird to face a world that you thought you had a skill that was going to be essential to your life going forward and now is different. That doesn't mean that I can't use those skills, and I'm sure there's lots of topics we can unpack later about that. But it's a weird thing, and I think I certainly have felt that recently.

02:36 I've felt this tension between the excitement and the overwhelm in equal parts sometimes, and that's tough. That's really weird to do. And in sort of the dark watches of the night when you're sort of having trouble sleeping or thinking about these things, I start writing down my feelings. A word kept coming back to me that I thought would be sort of the general topic that'd be good for today. And that is pivotal.

03:09 Because so much of where we are right now feels pivotal in two senses of that word. So pivotal is a word that can mean sort of changing so rapidly, sort of left, right, left, right, left, right, like that kind of... something that pivots a lot. And then you also often will hear pivotal used in the sense of big, kind of epoch-defining changes from one time, and then we pivot to the next period. And I think both of those things are happening.

03:45 I think on this micro level, the small level, boy, is it hard to keep up. Boy, is it hard to feel like you are able to wrap your arms around what is happening, what the best thing to do is, what's even happening, what's the news, what's changing. It is a never-ending seeming like news cycle that has functional, meaningful changes to the work that I do.

04:09 There was a period where it was like, oh, in June, Apple will announce things at WWDC, and that will be fun, and that will be exciting, and that will kind of kick me off for a year, maybe, or at least several months. And that's not the case anymore. The change of my workflow and the way things are pivoting is day by day, week by week now.

04:34 It's wild to me when I think about how WWDC in June, three, four months ago, when that happened, it was before Anthropic released Fable and totally changed all manner of workflows and expectations and things that are possible and things that are reasonable. That's since WWDC.

04:56 And you snap zoom into almost any two-week period since then, and there have been these huge constant pivots and changes, and that just sets up a situation where it is natural, it is definitely true, that you'll feel anxiety, you feel nervous. I certainly feel really uneasy about not knowing what the best thing to do is, what's happening, what's changing, because the ground is ever changing underneath of us, and that I find is really difficult. I find that that is really challenging in that form of pivoting, so the constant change.

05:37 And then there's the zoom out pivot, these big kind of structural changes to how we work, what we do, what it is to be a developer. For years and years I would have said, if someone asks me at a dinner party, "Hey, what do you do?" It's like, "Well, I make apps." And that used to mean something.

05:57 The word "make" there had a very specific vision in my mind of what I would do, that I'm opening Xcode as a text editor and typing characters into a text editor to put code in that then I run and I validate and I use, and that's what making looks like. And that is not what making looks like now. That era, that period of my life is likely gone to some degree. The degree to which that will be a part of my life, I don't really know. But I do know that it is going to look a lot less like that and a lot more like something else.

06:38 And I don't know what that new thing is, I don't think anyone does, but the new thing is definitely coming. The new thing is here, and that is a big industry-level shift. That isn't just a change that will affect me and my work, that is something that affects any iOS developer, especially the indie app developers, because I think we are often at the forefront of these kinds of changes. Because we have the ability to change and adapt so quickly, the big impacts sort of hit us first. We have less inertia perhaps to overcome, in good ways and bad ways.

07:17 And so I feel that. I feel that there was this change that has happened, that we have pivoted into a new era, into a new period of what it is to be an app developer, and that is cool, that is exciting, but it is also really scary.

07:35 It is also really unnerving, because when you spend a lot of time developing an expertise, to develop a sense of what is the way something should be done, and you get good at it, having that skill then become something that sort of becomes less relevant or less important is really weird, is really complicated and challenging, and I gotta say, it's been a weird time.

08:06 But on the plus side, I'm always someone who looks at these kind of situations and says, OK, this is the reality, right? Things are pivoting at the micro level, things are pivoting at the macro level. What can I do with that? What should I do with that? How can I change or adapt or improve my workflows, the way I think about myself and about what's happening, to... the word that comes to mind is to survive this, to ideally thrive in this, but at the very least to get through it in a way that is sane and rational and reasonable, and taking advantage of opportunities when they exist, but not taking advantage of things that are ultimately going to be counterproductive or harmful, and then just taking care of myself and the people I care about as part of this.

08:57 And so I think at the highest level, what I found for myself is there's two sort of logical things that I need to do as a result of this being a pivotal time in both senses. In the small sense, in the micro-pivoting sense of constantly changing, small adjustments, never-ending kind of a feeling, I've definitely found the importance of being aware of how difficult it is and being kind to myself inside of that.

09:29 Understanding that work is gonna feel really tough now. It's not gonna feel like it has for the last 18 years, where I had a sense of mastery and accomplishment and I knew it was happening. It's going to be that kind of early stages of anything when you haven't built in the grooves into your workflows, that you're still finding your way through kind of the rough, sort of loose sand part of things. And that's an exciting stage in some ways, but understand that that will take a lot of work.

10:02 That will take a lot of effort mentally and emotionally, and so I keep telling myself it's very important to take care of myself inside of that situation, to be aware that that is happening. Life is hard, life is challenging, so take care of yourself, be aware of that, get outside more, spend time with things that don't change.

10:26 These are things that I've definitely...in the back of my mind. Like, say I go out in nature and I look at a hill, a hill that's been there for thousands of years at least, and it gives me some comfort that I can walk amongst that. And even if it feels like everything is changing, everything's pivoting constantly, not everything is. It is a narrow sliver of my life that has that reality, and spending time in places and things that haven't changed, or the relationships that are the same as they were six months ago, even though a lot of other parts of my life feel like they've changed so much...

11:04 Spending time and reminding yourself that even if something feels like it's constantly changing, there's lots of parts of your life that aren't, and holding on to those and spending time intentionally focusing on those is what has been most helpful and impactful for me on the micro sense of pivoting.

11:20 And then I think on the macro side, on these big structural changes that are happening in our industry, the thing that I keep coming back to is the micro thing is about how I treat myself, and I think the macro sense of change is how we treat one another, how I treat others, how I'm being patient with...maybe is the right word for it...is understanding that this is gonna be messy, this is going to be complicated. There isn't a right answer that will work for everyone, or even just be the right answer.

11:52 And so, whenever that's the situation, it is important, I think, for all of us, but I'm speaking to myself here, to be as thoughtful and kind and patient as we can in the way we interact and think about how other people are adapting to this world, how we're responding to people making different choices as they try and navigate this.

12:15 Because that's been challenging for me. Some of these things can get really sticky and challenging, and you can have strong opinions that can make things really weird, to feel like you disagree with someone who maybe you previously did agree with a lot, or those types of changes.

12:32 And so, yeah, I think the phrase that I've sort of settled on in my head is the importance of sort of being reflective rather than being reactive. So when I see someone doing something or having an opinion that maybe I don't necessarily immediately and obviously agree with, it's the sense of like, huh, I wonder why they think that. I wonder where that's coming from. I wonder what I can learn from the perspective that they have.

13:00 And I think that has served me well as we all collectively try to find the new normal, find the new whatever this is gonna be.

13:11 I want to keep making software. I want to be in this industry, to be relevant, to make a business that's viable financially and make beautiful and wonderful things and take advantage of the tremendous opportunities I now have to do things that previously I couldn't do, to do things that previously would have been impossible or outside the scope of what a small indie developer could do.

13:37 And so I focus on those things and I try and hold on to them and understand that living in a pivotal time is an opportunity, is something that allows me to take advantage of things. In a weird way, it gives me the strongest memories back to the old early days of the App Store, where so many things just felt new and novel and newly possible.

14:04 Everywhere you look, someone would come up with a cool idea for a new app, a new way of doing something, a new capability that they could invent whole cloth for the iPhone, and that was an exciting time. And I feel so privileged that I lived in that time, that I got to work in that time, that I was able to sort of eke out a living initially in that time, and if that's what this ends up being, which I think is very likely, we will look back on this period and have those similar kinds of feelings. Like, what a privilege to have gotten to do that twice.

14:39 But in the meantime, I need to take care of myself to not get too overwhelmed by the feeling of everything always changing, and I guess we just need to take care of each other to work through this process in a way that is respectful, kind, and ultimately gets us to a cool place where we can all do our best work and make awesome things.