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resigned

resigned hospital i'd worked for the last 12 years last december.

developer job searching

tried to change career to tech but failed terribly for various reasons:

• bad job market?
• not enough positions for juniors, and they want juniors who have senior level skills and experience
• holiday season
• most of all, not having real work experiences
• not having a good portfolio to show for?
• turns out i'm not a good developer, i suck

actually i got a solo developer job at a small local korean remittance company right after i started job searching. but i just quit on the first day before signing the contact for seeing too many red flags from the get-go. passing the interview was too easy. no technical interview at all but more like "okay you can speak english. come to work next week" sort of easy. i thought i dodged a bullet, but i often think about this and wonder if i made a right decision. if i just sucked up the likely poor environment and stayed for a while or complete the project, i could've laundered my career for a fresh start.

after this, i pretty much didn't even get an interview from hundreds of job applications. i gave up switching career to tech and settled back to indie hacking as a hobby dev. i thought i just didn't have time to try properly but i just found out the reality and myself, and don't have regrets any more because i tried at last.

sitting in front of computer typing for many hours is also quite tiring. decided to just focus on family and working as a nurse. i guess being a nurse wasn't really the culprit of poorness, it has to be something else.

monthly subscription for roster

after figured out that i could still update the roster app, i hurriedly implemented monthly subscription and shipped it without testing properly, charging absurd $5 per month. many people got mad and left bad reviews. many would say no one's going to pay that amount of money just to see coworkers. but i was really surprised how many people were happy to spend $5/m. but for unknown reasons, some paid users weren't able to use the unlocked features. this drove me crazy and caused so much stress and sleepless nights. "it works on my machine" is not a joke. just abandoned the subscription model entirely after few attempts of failed updates, and reverted back to free for all. might have fixed the issue if debugged directly with not-working-devices, but charging people for service that i don't have full control wasn't ideal.

used revenuecat for the subscription, but will try to implement store kit 2 next time.

new job

got genuinely excited to land a new job at a private hospital as i'm ready to work hard like a new graduate. getting a new job as a registered nurse wasn't that easy either as i only got contacted from cardiology wards.

nursing agency

did some nursing agency work at a private hospital in between. having shifts cancelled few hours prior sucks.

thinking of continuing the agency work on my day offs to maximise income i missed for the few months. possibly i may just have to pay more tax for the cashed out long service leaves. this doesn't really reflect my ability to pay tax as that's all i have and it's shrinking rapidly.

would've been happier if i started agency work since last year rather than recently.

indie hacking

shutdown the roster app as soon as i got a new job offer. it's not really worth it for me to continue maintaining it. although i miss the potential profitability and happy (free) users. the app is still generating coffee-per-day money, but this is destined to diminish over time. although embarrassingly small amount, i kind of achieved goal of having >1 income stream.

and shutdown all the other garbage apps from the app store.

thought of switching projects back to web apps. but i haven't made a dollar on the web, but made some on apple platform.

pros of ios:

• easy deployment, distribution from the app store
• no analysis paralysis in choosing the tech stacks
• searchability of app store

cons of ios:

• app store review
• developer experience: swift, xcode

i have much more chance to earn another dollar by making ios apps than web apps. also learned that just making a bunch of useless apps is not the best way to increase the revenue.

reading

haven't read any books in 2024. thinking about apps all the time makes it hard for me to pick up a book.