Another New App: Tippette!

Tippette: Tipping Made Simple

 

This had been an idea for an app I’ve been sitting on for a while. A tip calculator is a simple thing, an easy app to make (this one took about a day). So why didn’t I have a good one? Why did so many of them have overly complicated interfaces, pop-up ads, or ask you to enter the percentages yourself? Why didn’t any take into consideration that you often have to split a bill multiple ways, and you want to figure out how much to put down?

Tippette was my way of cutting through all of that. The only time you have to enter a number is when entering the total. From there, you use sliders to split the check and another slider to rate your service. That’s it. You don’t have to think about percentages at all. I went with a simple scale.

Tippette: Tipping Made Simple

  1. Worst service ever: 10% (because you should always tip, even when it’s horrendous).
  2. Bad service: 15%
  3. Okay service, average service: 18%
  4. Good service: 20%
  5. The best service: 23%

I scaled this in such a way that people would be more likely to rate their service as good or best, as the jump in percentages isn’t too high. I wanted that balance between someone putting down a large tip for the server and not feeling like they were just throwing money down unnecessarily.

I personally have never been a server. But I know how important tipping is in the U.S. Service industry workers are often paid well below the minimum wage and rely on tips. Because of that I wanted to encourage people to see 18% as the average tip, not an exceptional one, and target 20% for good service.

 

So, if you want an easy to use tipping app that’ll make your servers love you, be sure to check out Tippette!

Side Projects

GitHub contributions graph. It's more sparse than it should be for someone who writes code every day.
My sad GitHub contributions. Would have been nothing but dark green just a few years ago…

When I was younger, everything that mattered was a side project. I would skip homework and studying to work on my newfound love of programming. My grades in high school may have dipped a little.

In college, my professors handed me piles of work. I did most of it. Okay, I did a good portion of it. I always made time for side projects. They weren’t always as fun as the game I built in high school, but everything was built by me in C++ and OpenGL, and I appreciated that low-level feel. Making a game like that was a hoot.

Then I started coding for 8+ hours a day in the “real world.” I made applications, middle ware, backend utilities, tests, and more. It wore me down. I no longer had time for those fun side projects. I came home and wrote a tech blog, the beginnings to novels, even a few episodes for a TV show. Don’t get me wrong, writing is a great hobby, probably my favorite. However, I think it’s about time I get back into side projects, if only so my GitHub page doesn’t look so barren.

Continue reading “Side Projects”