RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – Going Deep by Ken Yarmosh

Note from Ray: At our recent RWDevCon tutorial conference, in addition to hands-on tutorials, we also had a number of “inspiration talks” – non-technical talks with the goal of giving you a new idea, some battle-won advice, and leaving you excited and energized.

We recorded these talks so that you can enjoy them, even if you didn’t get to attend the conference. Here’s our next talk – Going Deep by Ken Yarmosh – I hope you enjoy!

Transcript

Today’s work environment is broken. We’ve trained ourselves to seek out interruption, to covet being busy, and to let technology run our day and life.

I know you’re feeling very inspired right now, even just with the material you’ve heard today. You’ve got another great day tomorrow.

Fast forward to Monday with me for a second. You get back into the office. You fire up your machine. You’re excited to start applying some of the things that you learned about today. You’ve got a new feature you’re ready to work on. You start working on that feature.

It’s 9:05 am. You get this nice little Slack message, and that Slack message says, “Hey, I gave you a Polar request last week. I need you to go ahead and get that done so we can merge this branch into Master.” You can see where I’m going with this.

You then start responding, and all of a sudden you have Tweetbot running in the background because we have to have Twitter open when we work, and we see a tweet. It’s getting a lot of attention.

You see it’s got a number of re-tweets, and it’s about an app that’s actually competitive to your app. The app happens to have the feature that you were about to start working on a moment ago. That app, as you do a little bit more research, you see it going up ProductCon.

You then find out, it has 1.5 million dollars in investment. It has a whole team of people working on it. You’re an independent developer.

Hours later, you don’t know who you are.

You don’t know what you were doing, and you come back ready to work on what you were about to work on, but guess what? You got to do that Polar request still and you still have to fix your app that’s crashing.

This might seem like a “whoa is me” mentality, but we’ve actually come to embrace this digital addiction to some extent. We regularly now use technology to magnify the worse parts of our human nature.

• We use technology to procrastinate.
• We use it to distract us, and
• we use it as an excuse.

Being reactive to the problems of technology is not a new mentality.

Throughout history, people have resisted all sorts of things:

• electricity,
• cars,
• radios,
• TV’s,
• computers,
• the Internet,
• mobile devices.

Everything, except Candy Crush. Candy Crush is something that we just had to hold on to. The amount of money people spend on that – let’s not even get started there. The point is though it’s harder than ever to avoid technology. Those of us that do what we do, that in and of itself is just not possible.

What do we have to do here? We have to come up with an approach and a mindset, if you will, to operate in this environment, to operate in an environment where technology is more interesting than ever, and society really has embraced this instant on-demand, 24/7 culture.

It’s not easy, but the benefits can be amazing. Clear thinking, less stress, and doing work that we’re incredibly proud of. This is the essence of what going deep is really all about.

Some Examples Of Going Deep

I want to provide you a couple of examples to make this a little bit more tangible. Keep in mind that when I outline some of these examples, it may not be what going deep looks like for you, and we’re going to talk about that as we go through this talk, but they should help solidify the concept a little bit more.

Another example might be a library that we use, and a lot of us use these kinds of libraries. Almost in every single app you open up, you see one of these libraries. That’s a good example of people that have taken a lot of time and attention and thought about a problem, and then really focused on that to build a great solution.

I almost thought about saying Xcode, but I decided not to. Another great example, we all like Xcode, but we have those days where we have to restart it 100 times.

Something like Sketch. Again, a lot of people here are probably doing development, but Sketch is a user interface design tool. It came out of nowhere. Now, it’s something that a lot of the top designers use today.

We use it at Savvy Apps for both user experience and visual designs, and as an example of someone that looked at a problem and really spent a lot of time focusing on building something better and now has a great amount of adoption. There’s all these plugins, so on and so forth.

Then, a little nod to the people here that got us here today. When you want to find how to solve a problem, what is the place that you turn to? The tutorial team does awesome work.

Even in terms of how they actually did this conference. Ray had all of us working and reworking our talks and gave great feedback, and this is the kind of approach that really is just exemplifying going deep.

1. I didn’t even know that he was going to talk about it, but an Apple Design Award. Pretty good example of doing this going deep mentality or doing deep work. It doesn’t just happen overnight. The amount of time that someone like Jeremy spent working on his app, strategy, marketing, design, development, to the fact that it gets all the way up the ladder into Apple, and the editors decide that this is going to be something that a handful of people get every single year.