Author: admin

New product announcement – Mowyty

I strongly believe that a technology doesn’t exist for itself. It does exist to make our life easier, more efficient and more enjoyable. It exists to help us. I’m working on an app that will help Ukrainians who either live in Poland or want to move there in the future. I’m working on the first in a Polish market, Ukrainian user friendly, one-language app that will let them learn Polish in their native language, not in English as it’s already possible in a few language learning apps. The app is called Mowyty. Why Mowyty? Mowyty means “speak” in Ukrainian but it’s easily understandable for Polish people as well.

There is an official Mowyty website live already, please check it out here: https://mowyty.com. Please sign up for a Newsletter to be notified once the app is available. It would be great if you could share it with your Ukrainian friends and colleagues too of course, thanks! 🙏 Speaking of the app’s availability, there will be 2 versions of the app available: for the iOS and Android platforms. I’m aiming to release the iOS one by the end of June 2022 and the Android one by the end of 2022.

What will Mowyty give you?

  • possibility to learn the most useful Polish words and phrases from 12 categories,
  • 3 levels in each category, you will start with the basics and get to the more interesting vocabulary later,
  • 2 modes: learn and test, first you learn the phrases and then you can check your knowledge,
  • 2 types of tests: question-answers one and a memory game,
  • Mowyty Pro – additionally, you get the exercise sheets in a Pro version of the app! 

It is the first time when I’m hiring an external agency to help me with building my product. Big thanks to Perpetio company from Lviv, Ukraine! Thanks for all your engagement, ideas and a great cooperation 🙂 I would also like to thank my friend Ula. Ula is Ukrainian, lives in Poland and is a Polish teacher (you can check her YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/c/PolishglotsUA) so she is the best possible source of feedback for Mowyty. Thanks for all your help, Ula! 🙂

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 3: technical interview

The 3rd article from my “iOS Developer – preparing for a recruitment process” series is live 🚀 You can read it here: https://damianmarkowski.medium.com/ios-developer-preparing-for-a-recruitment-process-part-3-technical-interview-86bad08b9fd6. Please feel free to reach out to me and share your thoughts, feedback 🙂 Thanks!

tournamentsheets.com reactivation

As you may know I have a DM Table Tennis app. A few months ago an idea of excluding a Tournament sheets part of the app to a website came to my mind. So I purchased a www.tournamentsheets.com domain and built a simple website offering the tournament sheets (in PDF files) to download for free.

There were the following sheets available:

  • 8 players – single elimination,
  • 8 players – double elimination,
  • 16 players – single elimination,
  • 16 players – double elimination,
  • 32 players – single elimination,
  • 32 players – double elimination,
  • 64 players – single elimination,
  • 64 players – double elimination,
  • 128 players – single elimination,
  • 128 players – double elimination,
  • 3 players – round-robin,
  • 4 players – round-robin,
  • 5 players – round-robin,
  • 6 players – round-robin.

Everything was fine, tournamentsheets.com was up and running for some time but I analysed my spendings and I wanted to optimise them. One of the actions that I decided to take was to decrease a number of web domains that I own. I thought that the best approach will be to keep my landing pages and web products under my main damianmarkowski.com domain.

My first step to slowly kill Tournament sheets project was moving it to damianmarkowski.com/tournamentsheets and not to renew the tournamentsheets.com domain anymore. The next planned step was to remove damianmarkowski.com/tournamentsheets entirely.

I didn’t do that though. Why? I kept seeing there is still some traffic coming to that website, even without me advertising or tweeting about it so I decided to give it the second chance.

Second life for tournamentsheets.com

So I’m moving back to tournamentsheets.com. I’m going to re-organise the website and the project’s business model. I will be offering tournament sheets on Gumroad for a small fee. I will re-build the website in the upcoming weeks and I should be able to start selling the sheets in the second half of May 2021.

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 2: technical screening

I published the 2nd article from “iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process” series on Medium tonight. Please check it out here https://damianmarkowski.medium.com/ios-developer-preparing-for-a-recruitment-process-part-2-technical-screening-da8c40d88eb3 and let me know what you think 🙏 😄 Thanks and have a great upcoming week 🙂

iOS Developer – preparing for a recruitment process, part 1: CV

I decided to write a short series of articles about preparing for a recruitment process as an iOS Developer. The first article is available on Medium already: https://damianmarkowski.medium.com/ios-developer-preparing-for-a-recruitment-process-part-1-cv-a0ca01f4409e. Check it out and let me know what you think! 🙂 The second part is coming soon 👀👀

Visit all the permanently inhabited continents in Postcardful

Version 1.5 of Postcardful is live in the App Store 🥳 I promised in one of my recent tweets (https://twitter.com/dammarpol/status/1368649813462556672) to publish it on Saturday, the 13th March, exactly 1 year after we started working from home because of the coronavirus but since I’m an impatient person and Apple approved the update quite quickly, I decided to click the Release button earlier 😀

What’s new in version 1.5? 

  • 🌍 you can travel through all the permanently inhabited continents now! A background of your journey changes respectively to a continent which you are visiting at a given time,
  • ✈️ speed of the planes changes as you progress to the next continents, the more you travel the more difficult is to avoid them!

You say all the permanently inhabited continents but in what order?

The order was set based on a number of the countries in every continent, starting with a continent with the lowest number of countries so you will visit all the continents in the following order:

  • South America,
  • Australia and Oceania,
  • North America,
  • Europe,
  • Asia,
  • Africa.

My website is nicer now :)

I try to keep updating my personal apps and games every now and then and this time I made my website a bit nicer, more interactive and more modern 🙂

I improved 4 things:

1. Nicer top menu

Previously, the top menu didn’t look like an important part of the page. The contrast between the colours wasn’t right.

After a change, you can clearly see a hierarchy of the website, that a top menu is something important and worth attention.

2. Refreshed About me section.

This section used to have a sad, dark background image (taken from some non-royalty free website so I had to put a copyrights info in a footer) and a text in a small box centered horizontally.

I got rid of that dark background, text takes more space horizontally now so you don’t need to scroll that much to see the rest of the website. I also added an interactive Twitter feed, you can quickly check what I post there 🙂

3. Completely re-designed Personal apps section.

 

This section used to have a static, small image links to the App Store or to the landing pages of my apps.

I changed it to a fully interactive, modern, horizontal slider with the nice and big images presenting my apps and games. Also I’m not including there the apps owned by the companies that I worked for, it’s only my stuff, only apps that I fully own.

4. Google Analytics events

This is a purely technical change but worth mentioning as well in my opinion. So I have a Google Analytics tracking since I published my website in 2015 but I was not measuring clicks on the buttons. It’s been added now, including social media images and Personal apps slider so I can analyse what works for you, what doesn’t and try to improve it in the future.