On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, I was doing my best to ignore the proceedings in Washington when my friend called to joke about it all. While Kash is a Canadian citizen, his family is from Pakistan and he’s a Muslim. We hadn’t had a chance to talk much during the election, but I’d assumed his feelings to be similar to my own. I was shocked to hear him talk about Clinton as “just as bad” as Trump, and to hear him opine that this isn’t so bad.

Throughout this awful US election season, I’ve been talking a lot of trash about Donald Trump, and justifiably so. There’s plenty of documentation to support what makes him a repugnant human being, and there’s no sense in covering it more. The fact is, the people of the United States elected him President. And they handed him a cooperative House and Senate, paving the way for a fully-stacked deck for the first time since the 1920s.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m reflecting on my failures. A few minutes ago I removed Magpie from the App Store, bringing to an end yet another in a long series of experiments that validate the hypothesis: Does Aaron know how to fail? Oh hells yeah, Aaron knows how to fail. On my podcast last week we received a question from a listener, which was essentially, “why does nobody talk about their failures?

I just read Brian Gilham’s piece, You Don’t Need a Computer Science Degree, which simply makes the point that prospective iOS developers (or let’s face it, any developer) don’t need a computer science degree to become successful in this field. As the holder of a bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s degree in Publishing, I can’t help but agree; but I also find myself moved to expand on that point.

I’ve spent most of the past decade with a near-maniacal, laser-guided focus on one ambition: to become an indie software developer. It officially kicked off after seeing Daniel Jalkut give a talk at C4 in 2007. Success hasn’t turned out to be exactly what I thought, though it would be churlish to complain overmuch: I run my own consulting business and I’m a full-time iOS developer. But my ambitions to be a product maker have mostly faded.