Aligned Pixels

Just build it: Interview with Nick Paulson

Meet Nick Paulson, a software developer from Rochester, New York. We had some time to speak with Nick about CloudApp, his future job at Square and of course, himself.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, Nick

I’m an 18-year-old Cocoa developer living in Upstate New York. I love everything Objective-C, but I’m also obsessed with design and pixel perfection.

When did you begin developing for the iPhone and Mac?

Well, if you want to call Applescript “developing” then I started probably 4.5 years ago with simple Applescripts. That evolved into Objective-C through the awesome Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book by Aaron Hillegass. 

When did you begin work on CloudApp?

We began working on Cloud just over 2 years ago, roughly. Back then it was a project with @mschoening and I, and over time we added more and more people to the project to help contribute to what it has become today.

What sparked the interest in creating a client that would revolutionize the idea of file sharing on the web?

It started off as a simple tool for @mschoening and I to share screenshots and mockups in Photoshop. We wanted it to be quick, simple, and work with a hotkey. Eventually it became a workable app, and we sent it to a few friends who we thought would like it.  Turns out that they liked it more than we expected, and came back with feature requests.  CloudApp became part of our workflow, and part of our friend’s, so we started building.

I see some competition in this market. Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to ensure you continue to beat other services that may come out in the future that do the same thing? 

At CloudApp, our mantra is to add what we love, and hope that our users love it too.  While we always have ideas on how to make things better, we take the “Apple approach” and do what we think is best, without focusing on our competition.

Congratulations on your internship at Square! What are you most excited about while working there?

I’m really excited to be working on a product that has a deep, low-level piece, along with a beautiful higher-level piece. The interaction with the reader is fascinating, and the designs are pixel perfect. Square is a fantastic product that I’m proud to have the ability to contribute to.

Do you have a “dream job?”

Honestly? I love what I’m doing now. It would be awesome to live in San Francisco and work on an awesome product there, but only time will tell what will happen in reality.

Where do you see yourself, CloudApp and your future work in 5 years?

I see myself evolving as a developer, designer, and overall, a thinker. As for CloudApp, I want it to gain motion and become the de-facto sharing service for files and links of all types.  Finally, as for my work, I don’t really know.  It’s really hard to know what is coming up in the next week, let alone five years from now. I just hope I’m loving my work, and enjoying my life.

Any tips for aspiring entrepreneurs and developers like yourself?

Stop thinking about positions, funding, or offices, and just build the product. You will only get so far without a working product ready to demo, share, or release. Build, iterate, and repeat. It’s a never-ending cycle. Learn to love it, and you’ll be set on all of your endeavors.

Thanks for your time Nick! You are a true example of the term “age is but a number.”

http://www.nickpaulson.com

http://www.twitter.com/nckplsn

To all of our readers,

Thank you so much for reading a post on Aligned Pixels. Be sure to follow us on both Tumblr and Twitter to stay up to date with us and our content!

http://www.alignedpixels.com

http://www.twitter.com/alignedpixels

Easy as Pie: Interview with Matt Patenaude

Meet Matt Patenaude, a software developer from Rhode Island. We had some time to speak with Matt about his development career, Bowtie, 13bold and his future projects.

We here at AlignedPixels absolutely love your stuff Matt! Mind sharing a little bit of information about yourself for our readers?

Well, I’m a software engineer from the beautiful city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I’m currently at Brown University pursuing a degree in CS, and I make cool Mac apps. 

What first sparked your interest in computer programming?

Well it all started back in kindergarten. Things that light up, they’re pretty exciting. I guess I first got the idea to start writing programs when I was in 7th grade, and I figured, since I like using computers so much, I should start making my own software. My first program was a little file size unit converter written in VBA in Excel. 

You talk about creating your first program in Excel. What was the first program you wrote in Xcode?

TuneConnect (http://www.tuneconnect.net) was the first real program I wrote on Mac. It started out in AppleScript, then slowly migrated to AppleScript Studio (which officially moved it into Xcode), and then finally with TuneConnect 2.0 it was rewritten with Cocoa, which made it my first ever Objective-C project.

That sounds awesome! What about Bowtie - when did that come into play? 

Bowtie came about a year later, it was a collaboration with graphic designer Laurent Baumann. He did the TuneConnect 2.0 icon back in the day before he was wildly famous, and we stayed in touch, writing little one-off apps together. He was pretty dissatisfied with most of the iTunes controllers on the market, but couldn’t come up with a good idea for UI, so I made him something to play with where he could make up a new UI on the spot. And then we realized what a great idea we’d had.

Glad to hear that. Have things at 13bold changed ever since Laurent went to work for Apple?

Ha ha, well things aren’t the same, that’s for sure. Apple contracts typically prohibit people from working on outside projects. Luckily for me, most of the actual UI work for Bowtie and the like was done before Laurent was hired (some of it wasn’t implemented at that point, but the mock-ups had already been completed).

Are there any projects that you have been working on lately. Possibly a Bluebird return or a Bowtie update?

I wish there were, but I’m afraid things aren’t looking amazing for our current apps. Bluebird will likely never come back, especially after Twitter’s “stop making Twitter clients” announcement (not to mention that there is no greater pain in this world than maintaining a Twitter client). As for Bowtie, the current release is quite solid. It may see one more small update in the future, but at this point, my hands are somewhat tied in terms of what I can do with it.

Why “13bold?”

We usually typeset it {13bold}, it’s an allusion to CSS, a la { font: 13pt bold; }. The default label text in Mac OS X is Lucida Grande, bold, set at 13pt. To me it just struck as an awesome name for a software development label. As I recall, I thought of it in the shower. The full name of the group is technically “13pt BOLD”, but it looks cleaner in ASCII as {13bold}. I was also recently contacted by the owner of the 13pt (http://13pt.com/) design studio, whose trademark preempts us by quite a bit, so I believe we might drop the “pt” entirely and just keep it {13bold}, one-word.

In 5 years where do you see yourself in both the career and personal aspects of your life?

Well hopefully at least I will have graduated by then. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a long-running internship with a particular fruit manufacturer, and if things go as planned, it would be nice to continue that relationship. But of course nothing is certain, and it would be silly to take anything for granted.

Any tips you can share for aspiring programmers?

The language doesn’t matter. A lot of people focus on learning how to program in a certain language, but software engineering is a distinct skill set in and of itself. Once you learn to program, picking up a new language in a weekend is easy as pie.

Also, one of the most valuable pearls of wisdom I was given when I was just starting out was from Andy Matuschak, the developer of the Sparkle software update framework: you don’t need to know everything, just where to find it. Learning to use Google and read documentation effectively is the most valuable skill you can have as an engineer.

And don’t do what I did and latch on to an established developer and pepper them with questions 24/7. They have lives. Learn to be self-sufficient early on, and you’ll learn things much faster.

Thanks Matt - we wish you the best of luck in the future :)

http://mattpatenaude.com

http://twitter.com/mattpat

To all of our readers,

Thank you so much for reading a post on Aligned Pixels. Be sure to follow us on both Tumblr and Twitter to stay up to date with us and our content!

http://www.alignedpixels.com

http://www.twitter.com/alignedpixels