Building the Table: Dev Diary #4 — Approved

There’s a particular kind of quiet that happens when you open an email you’ve been waiting weeks for and your eyes find the first word before your brain does.

Congratulations.

“We’re pleased to let you know that your app, Bid Whist Forever, has been approved for distribution.”

I read it three times. Then I sat there a minute.

The first one didn’t make it

I want to tell this part first, because leaving it out would sell you a story that isn’t true.

The first version I submitted was rejected.

The reason was account deletion — Apple requires that if people can make an account in your app, they can delete it in your app too. Fair rule. Good rule, honestly.

Here’s what stung: I had built that. Weeks earlier. The button was in there, it worked, it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

But the reviewer tested on an iPad. And on an iPad, it turned out, there was no way to get to it. The navigation on that size screen had quietly collapsed months before — every link still there in the code, just invisible on a bigger tablet. I never caught it because I test on my phone, and on a phone it worked fine.

So the app wasn’t missing a feature. It was missing a door.

That’s a humbling thing to learn from a stranger’s rejection notice. It’s also the single most useful bug anybody’s found in this whole build, and I’d never have found it myself.

Fixed it. Resubmitted. Approved.

The birthday I missed by a few weeks

I had a date in my head. My birthday, last month. That was the finish line — have it approved, have it out, by then.

And I want to be precise about this, because I actually did the hard part on time: I submitted before my birthday. I made my own deadline.

I just didn’t get the yes. There was a problem, and the problem meant starting the review clock over.

I let myself be sour about that for about a day. Then I fixed the thing and sent it back.

Missing a date you set for yourself is not the same as failing. Sometimes it just means the date was a guess and the work wasn’t finished. The work is finished now.

Thirty years

Here’s the part that’s bigger than an app.

I’ve been writing software for thirty years.

And I got into it because of games. That’s the origin. That’s the whole reason a younger me looked at a computer and thought I want to know how that works. I loved games. I wanted to make them.

So I went to Columbus State and learned to program. And I believed — completely, the way you believe things when you’re young and certain — that those were the same sentence. Learn to program. Make games.

They are not the same sentence.

Programming for work, most days, is making a system do a correct thing. A game has to do a correct thing and produce a feeling. It’s a different discipline wearing the same clothes. Opponents that play well enough to be worth beating. Four phones on four different networks staying inside the same hand at the same time. A card that lands like a card instead of appearing like a spreadsheet cell. Rules your auntie enforces from memory, written down precisely enough that a machine can enforce them too — and no two families’ rules are quite the same.

Thirty years. A whole career. Never once shipped a game.

Not because I couldn’t. Because I never sat down and did it.

So this isn’t just a milestone for the project

Approved is a milestone for the app. It is a much bigger one for me.

Somewhere back there, a kid decided what he wanted to build. It took me thirty years to get around to keeping that promise to him — but I kept it. That’s the part I’m still sitting with. Not the badge on a store listing. The fact that the thing I said I’d do, I did.

If you’ve been carrying one of those around, you know exactly what I mean.

Now the part where I ask you for something

Play it.

If you already play Bid Whist, you’ll be at home in about thirty seconds — Uptown, Downtown, No Trump, Bostons, the whole thing. If you’ve never played, the Learn section walks you through it hand by hand at your own speed, free, no account needed to start.

And then tell me what you think. I mean that literally, not as a closing pleasantry. Tell me what’s confusing. Tell me what broke. Tell me the rule your family plays that we got wrong, because somebody’s family plays it differently and I want to hear about it. Tell me what would make you want to sit down at a table on a Tuesday night.

I read all of it. The last big fix in this app came from somebody telling me something was wrong.

Send me your feedback →

And one last thing

If there’s something you’ve been wanting to make — an app, a business, a book, a song, a room in your house — do it.

Not “look into it.” Not “someday when things settle down.” Do the first small piece of it this week.

I spent thirty years believing that making a game was a thing other people did. People with different training, different jobs, different lives. It turned out the only real difference between them and me was that they started and I hadn’t.

Don’t believe it’s not possible. I believed that for three decades about a card game, and I was wrong the entire time.

Pull up a chair. I’ll see you at the table.