Writing Is Hard — Let’s Do Math

Tutorials ‘R Us

Several months ago, Ray Wenderlich put out a call for developers to write for his excellent tutorial site. So, I put my name in the hat, joined the team, and signed up to for my first tutorial in May: “Test Driven Development with iOS”.

Part way through, we decided that it needed a separate, smaller tutorial on setting up the test environment first, so I wrote Unit Testing in Xcode 4 Quick Start Guide which was published in early June.

Before very long, my small tutorial needed to grow into two parts. After working for a couple more weeks, it turned into a three-parter, and currently stands as a four-parter. After two months, it started to seem as though the more I wrote, the further the end was moving away. In the last month or so, I have finally started getting closer to the end as I write. But, given my current work load, it is very unclear when the end will come.

Ray has been very gracious and patient, but we both decided it was not to be.

Parts one and two are complete. Part three needs a final review, but is fundamentally complete. My plan now is to release the tutorial on my site as part of my iDevBlogADay posts, and hope that I can finish part four before it is time to publish it!

So, stay tuned next time for “Introduction to Test Driven Development (TDD) for iOS apps — Part 1”.

An Ode’ To Writing Tutorials

Sung to the tune of “Beverly Hillbillies” (but not aloud please 🙂

Come and listen to the story about a guy named Doug
A poor blog writer, barely kept his blog feed up,
Then one day he read his twitter stream,
And there saw a plea for a writer team.

Words that is, blog posts, steady stuff.

Well the first thing you know Doug says I'll take that gig,
It seems so cool, why not dig right in,
How hard can it be to keep up with this and that,
So he loaded up MarsEdit, and signed with R & V.

Readers, that is,
Analytics, Followers.


...much time passes (too much)...


Well now its time to say good-bye to Ray and all his team.
And I would like to thank him for kindly waitin' long.
You're all invited back again to Ray Wenderlich dot com
To have a heapin helpin of great tutorials.

We all need the support of others to do our best work. Find other like-minded developers that will provide encouragement and motivation through local user groups, conferences or meetups. A great collection of indie iOS developers have helped me stay on track through meetups, 360iDev, twitter, and iDevBlogADay.

I regularly attend Cocoa/iPhone developer meetups in Cincinnati, Ohio and Columbus, Ohio. If you are in the central or southwest Ohio area, come join me at either monthly meetup:

Finally, here is a little more information about me, Doug Sjoquist, and how I came to my current place in life. You should follow me on twitter and subscribe to my blog. Have a great day!