Captain Danko’s JavaScript Lab — Code Smarter with Tutorials, Frameworks & Dev Insights

How did I get here ? yes that is the exact thought in my head right now, how did I get here? ( or this link ) Yes not long ago, I had a job that paid a somewhat decent amount, I was working on a very challenging (and interesting) project and I had plenty of time to play games. Right now: well I am still working on an interesting project, not getting paid (not yet) and I am getting very little time to play games. Ok so maybe not 'thaaat' different from my former situation except the part about the money. The point is that being a sole founder in a startup, I just have to so many things at the same time, I mean seriously think about this, I am building a Java Spring web version for My Day To-Do , I have to deploy it to AWS , learn new APIs in iOS 11, make iOS11 updates, make job descriptions, find more employees (interns) to work with me at my startup etc etc. The number of disparate (different) tasks I need to get my head around is just staggering. In this post I will be shari...

In the last few months we have experienced a significant spike in downloads for our app ( My Day To-Do ), a lot of which came from China and all this was very confusing for me at first. App Analytics in iTunesConnect reported the number of people viewing the product page of our app on the App Store was far less the number of downloads? What was equally confusing was the data being reported in our App Analytics platform (Firebase Analytics), did not match the download numbers? My frustration and confusion lead me to embark on a journey to solve this mystery once and for all. I managed to gather enough knowledge and clues to draw a logical conclusion and formulate a theory that satisfies me to a point that this is no longer my concern. In this blog post, I will share my theory in greater detail and try to justify it based on a few facts and I can only hope it satisfies others confused by all of this. Background I have talked about my efforts to capture the Chinese market in my...

A few months ago something new happened at my startup, I got the first ever person to work for My Day To-Do i.e. I found a marketing intern. Interestingly enough as it turned out it would also be the first ever person that I would 'let go'. However I had hired two marketing interns and while I had to let one go, the other one stayed and I was very happy with how he had performed. In this blogpost, I will share my story of what happened with the first intern as well as describe in detail about how I managed the other intern's time. Background to getting help I have already talked about ( here ) how as of this year my startup  ( My Day To-Do ) is finally out of my apartment and into the Catapult co-working space at UNSW. Combine that with the limitation of me trying to do and manage every single aspect of my business, I thought why not get some help? Marketing is one of the weakest aspects of my business, I mean seriously, I am a man with  a background in Computer S...

My Day To-Do has been out for more than a year now and recently we got our first negative review/feedback on it and I assure you it was not easy to deal with. In summary, one the tasks that I had assigned to the former marketing intern at My Day To-Do was to contact a bunch of journalists for app review sites and ask them to review My Day To-Do. Of all those contacted, one of them got back to us and offered to review My Day To-Do provided we made some changes, however once we made those changes and asked him to review the app, he told us that he will not be reviewing it! In this post I will describe what his feedback was like as well what it was like for me to deal with. Why did I want non users to review my app? Lately, some app review websites have gained a lot of popularity and given how crowded the App Store is, it totally makes sense to have someone recommend whats best to you. Therefore I thought it was entirely logical for me to have a review of My Day To-Do published b...

I finally added a means of requesting users to leave a review for the My Day To-Do family of apps ( Pro or Lite ). The interesting thing is, the underlying code to do so is different for those using iOS 10.3 and above and those with iOS versions below it. In this post, I am going to share the code ( Swift ) to achieve that and my logic behind when to prompt users to leave a review. What logic? I mean as a user the last thing I want is for an app to ask me to leave a review, the first time I open it. That's just annoying and in that case I am more likely to leave a negative review. Anyway without further a due let's get to it. Background Prompting users to leave a review for My Day To-Do was a lower priority item on the list of things to-do for My Day To-Do. However the recent spike in downloads for My Day To-Do just made it a higher priority item and something to be done ASAP (If you want to know more about the download spike, you can read this post ). In my quest to ...

China is one of the most important markets in the world and one of my goals with My Day To-Do is to generate a solid active user-base in China. Lately I have doubled my my efforts to expand further into that market, that lead to this month when I (we) have had a rather significant and entirely believable spike in downloads from China. In this post I will be talking about some of the things that I (we) have done, am doing and will be doing to keep the momentum. p.s. the spike is not like 10,000 daily downloads or so but a steady stream of downloads from the region, read on to know more about the download numbers. Background  How did China become an important market for me? China wasn't always an important market for me, however that changed when I ran a sale on My Day To-Do last Christmas and as I have mentioned in this post , unexpectedly for me, China was the region with the highest number of downloads during that sale period. Ever since that, I have been thinking...