Matt

  • Great App Challenge of 2013

    This year myself and a friend have taken up the challenge of releasing a new iPhone/iPad game every 2 weeks to hopefully have 20-25 finished games by the end of the year. The strategy is to build upon 3 different game platforms for all the games.  Each game will add one new feature to the…

  • The Great App Challenge of 2013

    UFO Invader version 2.0 is submitted to the iTunes App Store for review.  It should be published in about a week. That marks the first app for what I’m calling the Great App Challenge of 2013.  The goal is to release 20-25 Apps this year between myself and Colum.  That’s one app every 2 weeks!…

  • Hiking to the inkpots

    We’re spending a night in banff and we went on a 5 hour hike along a river and then into the mountains to some interesting coloured springs.

  • Why you should use Celery and Django

    Celery is something that I kept hearing about but took me a while to wrap my head around.  Why is it important? What is it good for? With a couple of big Django websites under my belt it has become more obvious where something like Celery fits and why it’s useful. The first thing you…

  • Home Music System

    A while ago I set up a music system above the fireplace.  It uses an AirPort Express as a destination for playing iTunes music from my computers, iPhone or iPad.  The audio out channel from the AirPort Express feeds into a small amp that I found on Amazon for $20 which powers a pair of…

  • Finding Focus

    Programming is a task that requires long stretches of uninterrupted time to be productive.  A simple 15 second “How’s it going?” will almost inevitably lead to a 15 minute delay in work getting done.  A scary but true fact.  Programming, like design, and engineering tasks are most productive when you get into the “flow” or “zone”.  They…

  • Migrating from Apache to Nginx + Gunicorn

    I was never really sure why people opted to swap out the heavily tested, widely deployed Apache web server for alternatives other than those trying to eek out a little bit more performance.  Finally I found a good reason to change my setup. When trying to enable Celery for asynchronous tasks on my web server I ran into some…

  • Biting Off More Than You Can Chew

    If there is one fault that I have it is that I continually make ambitious plans and take on every little project that someone suggests.  The big iOS game that I was working on for the last month is looking like it’s too much for one person to complete in a reasonable amount of time.…

  • UFO Invader Fun Facts

    Since launching the game in September 2011. 27,049 Users have played started the game 107,276 times. They’ve played 501,609 games.  Purchased 3,103 continues, and 4,719 upgrades. Players have spent real money 468 times to buy in the game currency. The average length of time someone plays the game for is 5.8 minutes. 34% of players are in the USA.…

  • UFO Invader Update Coming

    The first game I did for iPhone was released back in 2011. Seems like eons ago. The game hasn’t been updated, or promoted since that initial release and yet there are still an average of 100 people playing it every day. I’m working with Colum on a strategy to launch a bunch of new games…