Anyone can build an application. The question is whether you can design, develop, maintain, and support one. Would you need a team, or could you manage it on your own? I've been on both sides of the fence and if I learned anything, it's this—as a one man team, your app is your life.

1. ONE MAN DEV TEAM
Jonnie Hallman destroytoday.com
adobe / destroytoday

2. HOW I STARTED
WHAT I MADE
WHAT I LEARNED

3. we got our first computer in 93, a mac performa 476, 25mhz, 4mb ram

4. Jane Blob
i got really good at clarisworks.
jane blob story, couldn’t change license name.
i didn’t know much about how digital stuff worked (apps, games, etc)...

5. I was really into video games and made websites for video game cheats/moves using
geocities & angelfire, but they always had banners....

7. JONHALLMAN.COM
dad noticed my interest, bought me jonhallman.com and hosting for christmas

8. $300 for lifetime of hosting - he still sends me the $0 invoices

9. tried really hard to ‘brand’ myself, but was never happy with the result, so the website
remained a ‘coming soon’ page for months

10. it was around this time that i learned about flash
i was the tech person for the middle school morning announcements

11. we needed an intro and i made an animation using shape tweens.

12. macromedia had a free 30 day trial for their apps, so instead of buying them...

13. i would reinstall OS 9 every 30 days
didn’t take too long for a 5 gig harddrive

14. how i got started
i was inspired by flash gods like joshua davis...

15. ...and robert hodgin, so i made experiments
they had such cool names, so i thought i needed one myself

16. FIRST-IN-LINE.NET
jonhallman.com wasn’t cool, so i also got first-in-line.net, possibly the worst domain name to
remember

17. inspired heavily by praystation
i’m the kind of person who feels empty when i’m not producing
always had a stack of loose papers with sketches on them
coded the ideas when i got home from school each day
super lame, had multiple email addresses for no reason

18. around flash mx 2004, i had enough and gave up on it...
I got deep into PHP and made dynamic web apps, like jpixel

19. it takes a 100x100 image and blows it up 10x, using dot patterns to represent each pixel

20. i got into graphic design during pre-college at risd and mica and turned my digital work into
print
I tiled outputted JPixel images, making huge 12x10 ft prints

21. SHAW JELVEH DESIGN
started working for a small studio called shaw jelveh design
first thing they asked is whether i can make flash websites

22. they had me design and develop 3 sites in my first 2 months
with tight deadlines, i learned how to code fast, esp since i worked 10 hours a week
i also learned to keep things simple

23. produced a dozen websites in less than a year
some of them, i only had a week or 2 before they were due

24. on my friend’s birthday, I was at his house and I challenged myself by coding luke’s site in
the duration of high fidelity

25. as well as learning how to code fast, i also learned how to learn fast
greenbuild, conference for sustainability

26. in my junior year, I heard about AIR and fell in love with the idea of apps rather than websites
I replaced most of my gd classes w/ independent studies

27. USERS VS CLIENTS
TOOL VS PRESENTATION
INCREMENTAL VS ONCE AND DONE
I liked app development because of this
you have to please clients. try to make users happy, but don’t have please them all.

28. NO RESTRICTIONS
ANY LANGUAGE
ANY PLATFORM
ANY IDEA
apps became very personal

29. DESIGNER
DEVELOPER
YOU
PROJECT MANAGER
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
requires many roles
I was ready because of shaw jelveh

30. 1 HOUR
1 HOUR
4 HOURS
1 HOUR
1 HOUR
what takes 1 hour for each person will take you 4 hours

31. DESTROYFLICKR
i took a photo imaging class.

32. we used flickr for critiquing
i hated the site - white background, static pages, very slow to navigate

33. i thought of taking this opportunity to make my own app using flickr’s api
i started sketching and brainstorming

34. since i was new to UI design and had such a heavy background in web design, the app looked
just like a website, but on the desktop.

35. (sorry, Ryan)
and i wasn’t an icon designer by any means, so i took inspiration from CS3, since most of my
dock was adobe apps.
i later met the icon designer during my adobe interview.

36. (movie of DestroyFlickr too large for download)
the end result was an app that had a better environment for photos (dark background)
it was very fast because it only needed to load the images
you could page through hundreds of photos in seconds with animated transitions

37. i tried to make features that were unique and that I would get a lot of use from, like drag and
drop downloading.
you could drag a handful of thumbnails and it would download the hi-res versions.

38. I took it a step further and made it so you could drag and drop a contact to download their
entire photo library

39. i released it for free and shared it with friends and fam
the install count went from 30 to 3000
i started getting tons of emails. some reported bugs, others requested features, and some
just said thanks.
I tried to respond to every single one.
many didn’t realize I was one guy.
someone even gave me a ps3

40. flickr caps the api at 1 query per second, once destroyflickr reached that, instead of throttling
DF...

41. they interviewed me

42. on top of that, i won an adobe design achievement award
i knew now that maybe app dev was a good direction

43. enhance!

44. enhance!

45. WHAT DID I LEARN?

46. THE WORD “DESTROY”
SCARES PEOPLE
many didn’t use it because they thought it would delete their account.
at the same time, many used it because of the name.

47. DON’T DEVELOP AN
APP YOU WON’T USE
you’ll miss essential features and ux will suck
i didn’t use flickr much, so i missed essential features like sets/groups

48. NO APP SHOULD REQUIRE
A GIG OF MEMORY
memory - not a concern for web, but definitely for apps
keep track of everything you allocate memory for

49. a feature like this shows complete disregard for memory

50. MOST GOOD FONTS DON’T
SUPPORT A WIDE
RANGE OF CHARACTERS
selecting all the glyphs you want to embed doesn’t mean the font has those glyphs
arial ms unicode is the only font with (almost) every glyph

51. i thought all i needed to do was check these boxes

52. USE PROVEN METHODS
AND CONVENTIONS
i didn’t go to school for programming, so i didn’t know any design patterns or any of the
terminology
use an architecture framework (mvcs, robotlegs)
follow a common coding style
otherwise you’ll spend more time refactoring when you discover your way doesn’t work well.

53. since I only ever dev’d by myself, I didn’t really know what good code looked like.
the style I used was based on what I found useful and it was soooo bad

54. KEEP APPS UP TO DATE
WITH DEPENDENCIES
if you want to continue developing an app, keep it current with your libraries
I was able to develop DF fast because I had a lib for common classes, like images, text, etc.
i forgot to update DF with my libs, and it was too late

55. TALK ABOUT TWITTER!

56. To me, Twitter is a background service, like IM. It’s not fulltime, like Photoshop or Flash
Builder. When I want to tweet, I’ll open it, tweet, then hide it.
All the current apps were bloated and cumbersome, so I made DT super light and super
intuitive. Hotkeys galore.

57. DESTROYTWITTER
spent a day researching others, jotting down pros/cons
then coded v1 in 10 days over christmas break

58. MOST USERS KNEW
“DESTROY”
(old people don’t use Twitter)
so it didn’t scare people as much

59. PERFECT APP FOR
COLLECTING FEEDBACK
also made it easier to respond to users, instead of emails bottling up

60. I
i knew to use a proven framework, like Robotlegs

61. It was my first persistent app—open for long periods of time. Because of this, I paid extra
attention to memory and CPU usage.

62. And once I got the basic Twitter functionality down (tweeting, streams, etc), I started adding
special features I wanted.
Because of unfollow drama and events, I added filters. DMs and unfollow notifiers make
things awkward, and i’ve been confronted

63. Since Twitter is reading-intensive, people want it to be easy for them to read. For some, that
means black text on white, for others it’s white text on black, so I made themes. Now no one
complains.

64. With so many users, you have thousands of opinions. Everyone wants the app to work
different, so I added preferences when anyone wanted something a specific way. It quickly
overflowed the preference pane.

65. Place a file called ‘debug’ here to receive RTEs with full stack traces.
I set up a script to email users’ stacktraces to me.

66. 300,000+ INSTALLS
1 MILLION+ TWEETS/MONTH

67. WHAT DID I LEARN?

68. A RESIZABLE WINDOW
IS A REQUIREMENT
NOT A FEATURE
support a resizable window

69. DO NOT PUSH AN UPDATE
BEFORE YOU GO TO BED
a bug will always exist
http://http:// story

70. USE A PROPER
VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM
...

71. I kid you not, this is what my version control system was.
I didn’t know version control existed, so I’d zip the folder.

72. NOT EVERY UPDATE
IS FROM 1.0 TO 1.1
backwards compatibility

73. PEOPLE LOVE ANYTHING
PRIVATE & BETA
(especially teen ‘professionals’)
free quality engineers

74. PUT FRESH EYES
ON YOUR CODE
working alone on something for too long makes you too familiar and you miss things.
go open source or set up code reviews. everyone learns.

75. we use code collaborator at adobe

76. AUTOMATE AS MUCH
AS YOU CAN
since you’re just one man, the more you set up to run automatically, the more time you have
to be productive
use build scripts, unit testing, continuous integration, make a common lib

77. use jenkins

78. FINAL THOUGHTS

79. MAINTAINING AN
APP IS A HUGE
COMMITMENT
(especially alone)
think years and make sure you’re ready to invest your time and energy

80. MOTIVATE YOURSELF
WITH VARIETY
if you code all day for work, the last thing you’ll want to do is code all night.
your work will use up all of your creative juices and you won’t have much left for your apps.

81. HAVE FUN
Enjoy what you’re working on.

82. THANK YOU

83. ONE MORE THING...

84. I AM OPEN SOURCING
DESTROYTWITTER

85. website destroytoday.com
email jonnie@destroytoday.com
twitter @destroytoday