Resonance Blog 1. - Life without coffee

Hi, I’m Marko, (mostly) an iOS developer and this is a somewhat weekly list of interesting articles, books, podcasts, music, and videos that I come across during the week that helps me grow or resonate with me in some way. I hope you enjoy it and find something useful here.

Life without coffee ☕️ 🤔

I’ve been an avid coffee drinker for most of my adult life so it comes as a surprise that last 3 weeks I do not drink coffee anymore. Headache, fatigue, and low sleep quality made me on this step, to try to “clean” my body of too much caffeine. Sometimes it felt like I am an addict in rehab but lately I feel that I think more clearly and headaches are less intense…

Anyway, this new state of my life got me in the quest for espresso coffee replacement and I got some interesting insights

It seems that french press coffee is stronger than espresso even I would not say by the taste and also usual coffee replacement - black or green tea, is also well-caffeinated:

An average cup (237 ml) of black tea packs 47 mg of caffeine but can contain as much as 90 mg. For comparison, green teas contain 20–45 mg, while white teas deliver 6–60 mg per cup (237 ml)

I’ve been sticking with green tea mostly and sometimes had a cup of black tea also, but from these figures, it seems that black tea can have more caffeine than espresso shot so I guess replacing coffee with black tea was not that good idea 😄

iOS Dev articles/podcasts 💻

• New blog post from Jordan Morgan **about life as an Indie book writer/developer. I have learned a lot from his book already, but now we can see how it looks "behind the curtain": "my life is also like being in college now - where there is a deadline for a paper constantly looming over my head. Instead of having shaggy hair and slamming Red Bulls to finish a paper, I have three kids and a big boy job that come first. So the pressure of a deadline helps and hinders. I have my name behind this, and I want people to get true and lasting value from the project."
• In last weeks episode of StackTrace podcast - “One big transformation engine” John and Rambo give one nice tip that sound obvious but a lot of people forget about it - always look at your commit before the final push, do it as you are doing code review for someone else. You can fix a lot of bugs this way before they get out of control 🙂
• This week I have listened to an old episode from Developer Tea podcast named “The Most Critical Career Mistake You Can Make”. Here host Jonathan Cutrell is talking about the importance of being in control of your career since YOU are the person who is most interested in your career.
• In the iOS Indie world, Launched podcast is back with great talk with Russ Shanahan, the creator of Happy Scale - health tracking app. Russ has ups and downs down the road but he is now a fully independent developer. One of the conclusions from this episode is that it is a big market and yes, there is a lot of similar applications, but there is a chance for success if you make a highly specialized application and hang on one key feature that users will appreciate. You can listen to this episode here

Tools 🛠

For last year I’ve been a yearly subscriber of TickTick app, but since the subscription is coming to the end I realized that this tool is getting too big for my needs. I ended up putting all the ideas, notes, todos in TickTick and even try using it as a Project management tool. All this is good and has its advantages but I felt overwhelmed and lost when I open it. The easiest solution would be to clean this and start from scratch, but hey, why do it easily? 🤷‍♂️

I have switched to Things 3 app for task manager which has a simpler interface but it still has a lot of features that I need, Agenda app for notes and Notion for organized stuff and Project management. I have split my tasks and notes and also my focus on big picture and details and so far so good 👍