Being Successful - Is There An App For That?

OK, there are a lot of smart people in this world; even a lot of motivated people and a few clever ones here and there. This week I had the opportunity to interview someone who has all three of these characteristics, TSTC student Robb McMahan.

A little history about Robb: He first moved to Marshall, Texas from Tennessee because he was doing website production for Kenny Wayne Shepherd, blues/rock guitarist from Shreveport, Louisiana. He started working for the Marshall News Messenger as their Website Producer and continued to share his knowledge of the music business by mentoring local musicians and songwriters in east Texas. On a whim one day, he decided to stop at Texas State Technical College and was escorted right to my office. He told me he wanted to take a couple of programming classes (C++ & Java) but really wasn’t after college credit. I signed him up through Continuing Education and off he went. About a year later, he showed back up and said he had really enjoyed those classes and wanted to get the entire A.A.S. degree in Software Engineering. He’s been going to school ever since and will graduate Fall 2009.

Well, Robb enjoys programming so much that earlier this year he sent himself to two programming workshops. One was in San Francisco and taught how to create applications for the iphone. The other was in Salt Lake City and focused on the 3D gaming platform Unity. Shortly after attending these workshops, Robb released his first iphone application, a game entitled Spacewalk 3D. Apple approved the game and began selling it in the iphone store. Since that time, Robb has created 5 more iphone applications, one of which is a mirror, or reflective device, that can change colors or be used as a flashlight. Instead of selling this application, Robb offers it for free in the iphone store. Why would he do something like that? “I make more money off of that application than any of the ones I sell. People pay me to place an ad on the application. Right now, the mirror app has been in the top 100 downloads in the itunes store and is about to be in the top 50.” The profit he’s making from the advertising well makes up for not charging people to download. And downloading the mirror app is exactly what 8,000 people world-wide are doing each day, not counting the 20,000 ad views that he’s getting on those banner ads people pay him for!

So what I wanted to know was whether or not Robb felt that his education at TSTC had helped him in these new ventures. I was not disappointed. “What I learned here was definitely the foundation to everything else I’ve learned. I learned the foundations of programming, the languages and the concepts. Plus, I absolutely love the faculty here. I can’t say enough about the program or Phyllis Hollingshead. Her dedication to her students is unmatched,” says McMahan. He marvels at how Ms. Hollingshead is able to get very difficult concepts across in a variety of ways.

He also credits Greg McDaniel, his Algebra and Trigonometry instructor, with helping to develop one of his apps, Mood Almanac. The purpose of this piece of software is to calculate a person’s bio-rhythms and predict what kind of mood they’re going to be in on a certain day. Robb was having trouble getting the calculation to work so he went to his instructor. McDaniel gave him a trigonometry function that worked like a charm!

Robb’s other apps include Twitpickr, used to see updates to friends’ Twitpic accounts, Photo Finder & Background Buddy, that use Flickr as their search engines. Now you understand why I said he was not only smart but motivated and clever!

It’s all three of those characteristics that have gotten him to his next big adventure, moving to California and going to work for TCS, a third-party contractor for Apple. He will actually be working at Apple headquarters near San Jose, California. Robb said since it was getting close to graduation, he went to monster.com and updated his resume to include his iphone app development. Calls from prospective employers started the very next morning and are still coming in at an average of 2 a day. He is excited and ready for his big move, even though the company has been very hush-hush about what he’s actually going to be doing. His title is Senior Software Developer but all he knows is he’ll be working on something “really big” that Apple plans to release in 2010.

As far as advice for others thinking of going into software development, Robb says, “The profession is a really good one to be in. Technology is always advancing. Just think about it, just two years ago, we didn’t have iphones. You do need to be detailed and patient to write code.” He also says that this career is definitely for someone who likes working at and with computers. They might find some of the programming concepts difficult at first but will probably catch on. “I could probably go look back at the first program I wrote and laugh. I never dreamed when I started taking classes that it would lead to this,” he chuckled.