RWDevCon Inspiration Talk – Opportunity by Jake Gundersen

My First Tutorial

The second opportunity was the opportunity to write for the raywenderlich.com Team. I had been reading the blog for a while. I learned a lot about Cocos2d. I had a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for the work that Ray was doing and his other writers. I saw one of these (It wasn’t this one because this is 2014.) posts:

I really wanted to write for the site but once again, I really felt like I wasn’t at that level.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I looked at the other people, Ray himself and the other people, he had writing for him, and I just said, “I’m not at that level.”

I struggled with writing at that time. I had been through school and really practiced writing but I just felt my writing skill was still pretty weak. But, I really wanted to do it. I knew that if I toggled that giant, that I would feel once again that I was capable of doing things that really impress myself. That I was kind of awesome.

I went ahead and emailed Ray. It turned out that he was looking for somebody to write a Corona tutorial and I just happened to have spent couple of months playing around with Corona. So, I wrote a Corona tutorial and I got it published:

Having my name on a post, on a site that was read such a large audience was huge for me because it was something for which I had so much respect. The idea that you could just put your knowledge on the web and that people will flock to you and that could become your career, that blew my mind. I thought that was so cool.

That again led to another opportunities.

• I have participated in most of the “By Tutorials” series books.
• I wrote the Platformer Game Starter Kit.
• I’m a co-host of the raywenderlich.com podcast with Mic.
• I’m here today at RWDevCon as a speaker.

All of that flowed from me saying yes and again, I was right on that precipice where I was really hesitant to do it but I knew I have to push myself and I did.

My GPUImage Experience

The third opportunity is the opportunity that you create.

I had gotten into image processing through writing about Core Image for iOS 5 By Tutorials. I fell in love with it. Core Image was limited at the time because you couldn’t write custom kernels? so you’re limited to the set of filters that you had. I really wanted more.

Just shortly thereafter, Brad Larson came out with his GPUImage framework. This was exactly what I wanted. Anything you could do in a shader, you could do in GPUImage which was awesome.

I jumped in and I started learning GLSL and OpenGL. I didn’t know it before but I really wanted to be able to do this.

I got into this and instead of just learning it for myself, I started contributing filters back. I was number two or three for a little while on the list of contributors. Brad Larson was about 95% of the code and then I was about 3% but that still put me near the top.

My name was on his project. I wrote a couple of blog posts about how to write filters. So people were emailing me for help with their own GPUImage projects.

This GPUImage work that I did created this environment for myself where people were coming to me for help with this great framework. It turned in to be huge thing. Probably about half of my living today come from helping people out with GPUImage.

The great thing about the OpenGL scale is not every iOS programmer is willing to dive in and learn OpenGL. A lot of times, other programmers will come to me and I will just do that little chunk of their app and they’ll do the rest.

Working with programmers is great.

• They’re easy to work with.
• I get to charge a premium rate because it’s a specialized skill.

It’s turned out to be fantastic.

Then, on top of that, at one point Apple was recruiting for their Core Image team. They contacted me and flew me out for an interview.

I would never have applied for Apple. I mean, I don’t have a CS education. I had been programming for only a few years. I did not see myself as anything like the guys I expect work there. Yet, because of this work I did with GPUImage, I got this opportunity to go talk to them and interview for a job, which was awesome.

What Would Tina Do?

All these opportunities have one main thing in common for me. That was that in all these cases I already felt like I was not qualified. I didn’t know what I was doing. They required me to get outside of my comfort zone.

These are just the few examples. You’ll find that as you push yourself, this is how you grow. As you put yourself into this situation where you don’t feel you’re equal to the task, you’ll find yourself rising up to the task.

You have to be able to walk into the unknown.

You have to put yourself in this jeopardy situation where you could be humiliated or you could fail. A lot of times you don’t. A lot of times you surprise yourself. Even when you do, you find that you grow.

The question is, how do you do that? There’s this book by Tina Fey called Bossypants. She talks about this rule.

Early in her career, she learned improvisation. It’s a style of comedy. In improv comedy, actors create a situation on the fly, a scenario.

The rule with improvisation is you always agree with your partner. You always say yes.

Here’s an example. If I say, “Freeze! I have a gun.”, and you say, “Ah. That’s not a gun. That’s your finger.” Well then, the scene has come into a halt. You can’t go anywhere from there.

If instead I say, “Freeze! I have a gun,” and you say, “The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!” Well now we have a scene and it’s rolling.