When I started the Guestbook app in 2011, I wrote it as a favor to a friend, and as a learning opportunity. A work friend was getting married and wanted to use her iPad as a Guestbook, but there weren’t any apps in the App Store that fit her needs. I had been playing around with the SDK for a couple years and looking for a project idea I could publish, so I wrote a basic one up real quick. I pushed out a 1.0 in about a month of evening & weekend work, and had all kinds of grandiose plans about where to take it.
Then life happened, as it usually does. Beth was pregnant with our son, and as soon as he was born all hobbies went out the window. I’d much rather spend time with him than writing code anyway, and I got a new job writing iOS applications. Getting paid to do what you like and all that jazz. Thirdly, it isn’t exactly setting the world on fire anyway. At the time I wrote it there wasn’t any competition, but now there are 8 guestbook type applications in the app store, and several are free. I’m going to keep charging a nominal amount for mine in the hopes that it will earn enough to keep paying for my developer license, but anyone who contributes can get a promo code just by asking.
It was a lot of fun to write, and I believe it helped me land my current job (if nothing else than just through the experience). Hopefully someone finds it useful, even if it’s in a what-not-to-do sort of way. I still have the laudry list of things I want to improve, both feature and code quality wise, but this is my acknowledgement that I’m not going to get to it any time soon.