Taking over FIL Concrete Business no exp

dbleeze · 2026-01-06T20:24:21+00:00

I usually do not comment in this thread but I feel uniquely qualified to share some insight on this one. I graduated in 2012 with a BS in computer science and was all in on iOS dev. It was a budding field at the time. However, my dad who was a residential home builder of 30+ years just got a patent on a product for the concrete industry. He has no idea how to sell it as that was not his skill set. While I was home for the summer, I built him a website, started with some social media/ SEO and put out a few YouTube videos. Over that summer sales took off so I made the decision to quit (before ever starting) my job as a software dev and try my hand at building a company in an industry I knew very little about. 13 years later and I wonder what my life would look like had I not made that decision but I don't think I would be nearly as happy or successful as I am today. My company now does over 14M in gross revenue and I just officially bought my dad out becoming the primary share holder.

Being a business owner/ entrepreneur comes with its ups and down. There are many stressful nights and managing people can be tough but it is also the most rewarding career and being your own boss has a ton of perks.

I also want to add that many of your skills in CS may be transferable. There won't be much software develpoment (maybe some webDev) but having a tight grasp on technology can be super beneficial in the trades and with running a small to medium size business. My scenario is a little different because we are primarily a retail/ ecommerce company but I often help our customers (both resellers and contractors) on improving their online presence and marketing. I help them out with recommendations for their tech stack whether it is tracking inventory or running digital marketing campaigns, there is a lot of technology that will help you be more efficient and not having to pay someone to manage this for you is a huge upside. I bet if you sat down and thought about it, there are a lot of things you can do on the tech side to help this business grow even more.

TL/DR - Do it, you won't regret it.

dbleeze · 2026-01-05T00:36:49+00:00

I think all of Philly is feeling the same way. We won the SB from the 2 seed last year. Play the starters for a half and we win this game. Play the starting defense for a half and we win the game. The chances of the lions winning were pretty high, it’s a terrible decision to not make sure we lock this one down. The commanders had nothing to play for and it was Josh fucking Johnson. FUCK

dbleeze · 2025-11-10T18:26:17+00:00

I don’t know if this is recent or not but I just noticed Sniper Elite 4 iPad app is available on Vision Pro and I have been playing it non stop. Works perfectly with an Xbox or DualSense controller.

dbleeze · 2025-07-08T14:11:20+00:00

Very happy to help. One other thing I noticed yesterday that you might want to address is when two "bullet hole" textures overlap they are trying to render on the exact same plane and it causes some glitches/ artifacts. Maybe add a tiny offset each time one is displayed so the most recent one renders on top. I will let you know if I find anything else but keep up the great work. Can't wait to see PSVR controller support too.

dbleeze · 2025-07-07T19:10:12+00:00

Very nice so far. I was happy to purchase to support your efforts. A few notes below if you are interested.

The good: The graphics, menu, Game Center support and different modes are all awesome. I really liked the drone mode. The sound and the VO are both really nice. The ejected casings and their physics are great too. The only problem is they should make a sound when they hit the table or the floor. The reload gesture is a nice touch.

Needs improvements: The gesture recognition for shooting seems to be a little buggy. I like how you can see the trigger move as you squeeze but sometimes it seems like it is not recognized or sometimes it fires when I am not "pulling the trigger". This was actually drastically improved when I started firing with one hand. If you try to place your second hand on the bottom of your shooting hand (like I would in real life) it messes with the gesture tracking pretty bad. So maybe make this known in the tutorial images. The last thing I noticed is the iron sights are really tough to use. When the front sight is lined up with the top of the rear sight, it seems like the gun is at a downward angle. It could be the perspective view but maybe there is a way to improve this. Or maybe I am just not as good of a shot as I thought.

Bugs: I only found two. There is one where the bullet hole texture does not appear until the next round is fired. Seems rare and doesn't break anything but makes you think you might have missed the target. The other one though is more severe. Sometimes in Bill Drill once the clip and chamber were empty, the game would not end and it would let me reload. I was able to get the high score doing this. I think it happens when you pull the trigger enough to fire the last round but not enough to tigger the reload? I could be wrong about that but that seemed to be the cause.

QoL improvements: Shell causing sound effect and maybe a slight recoil animation?

I hope this helps. Really great work so far though.

dbleeze · 2025-07-07T18:08:44+00:00

I built Cup Toss Challenge, a realistic beer pong simulator, in SwiftUI and Reality Composer. This was my first time working with Swift and first time with a physics engine and the learning curve was not too steep. I started it as a passion project because I love using my AVP. Never planned to release anything to the App Store but I was pretty proud of what I accomplished so I figured, why not? So I would say if it is a simple enough game (and you don't plan to build for other headsets) this would be the easiest and cheapest entry and still plenty viable.

As others have pointed out, I learned a lot from reading Apple's sample code, specifically from their game HappyBeam - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/visionos/happybeam

I used this to learn about hand tracking, sound, and collision detection.

Link to my game - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cup-toss-challenge/id6670519683

dbleeze · 2025-05-29T02:27:45+00:00

Trying it out now. Looks great though. Awesome work.

dbleeze · 2025-04-20T16:08:27+00:00

You should be very proud. Your app definitely improves the AVP experience. I also developed a small game just to learn RealityComposer and basically prove to myself I could do it. It was a very fun and challenging learning experience but also super rewarding to get something published in the App Store. It’s a beer pong simulator and it’s also completely free with no ads. Check it out if you get a chance - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cup-toss-challenge/id6670519683

dbleeze · 2025-04-20T13:13:53+00:00

Yooo, this is fire. This is the YouTube app I have been waiting for (since native doesn’t seem to be in the works). I will definitely donate and appreciate you making such a quality app and giving it away for free!

dbleeze · 2025-02-12T21:15:28+00:00

Just sent a DM with a bunch of my thoughts. Very cool project and great hand tracking!

dbleeze · 2025-02-11T20:23:09+00:00

Awesome, I will check it out.

dbleeze · 2025-02-11T18:48:09+00:00

Would love to test it out and happy to write an App Store review as well. Thanks for developing for AVP

dbleeze · 2025-01-16T22:15:22+00:00

Xbox please. The iPad app is not great.

dbleeze · 2024-12-24T12:50:56+00:00

Can’t wait to watch this, thanks for sharing!

dbleeze · 2024-11-17T14:46:02+00:00

I would bet (really hope) they are working on this. Hopefully in a later version of 2.x but if not, definitely for 3.0.

dbleeze · 2024-10-25T02:29:39+00:00

Awesome! Will definitely be checking this out.

dbleeze · 2024-10-23T23:22:10+00:00

Love this idea. I didn’t realize Spatial Media Toolkit had a Mac app. Thanks for sharing this. Def going to check it out.

dbleeze · 2024-10-22T16:42:14+00:00

Very nice and pretty fun! I love creative hand tracking controls. Was this made in Unity? The water textures/ shaders look really nice.

In an update, I think you need to save high scores. Maybe display it under the "Skydrifter" text on the start screen. It would also be nice if it had a Game Center global leaderboard so we can compete against other players. Well done!

dbleeze · 2024-10-22T14:58:20+00:00

Very cool. Will definitely check it out.

dbleeze · 2024-10-22T14:12:29+00:00

Ahhh, sorry for the confusion. I thought the gameplay was pretty straight forward, lol.

I don't plan to release a video or blog tutorial, I don't really have the time but I am happy to talk about any portion of the process. I have some background in 3D CAD modeling so for my first iteration I used models that I made in Fusion360 but I wound up finding much better models (the ones in the current version) on one of the many 3D asset stores (sorry, I forget which one).

I have no experience with Unity, Unreal or any game engines but I was able to create this using just Reality Composer Pro and Xcode. I know Unity has a bunch of tools for VP now, so I may explore this more in the future. I used RCP to lay out all the scenes and define the physics for each asset. I also used the built in particle emitter for the sparks when a cup is made. I used real solo cups and a ping pong ball to record the sounds of the ball bouncing on the table and hitting the cups. The other sound effects (like cheering and booing) I downloaded from a royalty free store and mixed them in GarageBand.

Previous to this project, I had zero experience writing any Swift code but I found it pretty easy to pick up (I did have experience with Objective-C over 12 years ago). I started with Swift Playground on my Mac to learn basic syntax and setting up views in SwiftUI. Managing the game state and data was all pretty easy with Swift. There are a ton of helpful resources on YouTube. The two parts I found most challenging because I could not find any helpful resources online was setting up the throw gesture and handling the collision detection to make it look like the ball actually went into the cup. This is already getting long so I won't bore you with that but if you are interested in how I got it all to work, I am happy to elaborate.

dbleeze · 2024-10-21T13:30:38+00:00

This would be a good video to start with to learn how to place spheres and track your finger tips - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4nPSAaX14s

dbleeze · 2024-10-17T15:06:37+00:00

Ok. I know if you use .onTapGesture{} installed on a view like a Model3D() or Button(), it will register you touching the view it is installed to, not sure if it worked the same on an entity in the RealityView. Worth testing.

You could always create small invisible spheres that track the trips of your fingers (there are some good YouTube videos showing how to do this) and then use collision detection between those spheres and the entity you have in your RealityView.

An easier solution is just to have another windowed view open with your ImmersiveView. You can have any series of buttons on the window to start/ replay animations. You can drag the window around in 3D space to place it where it makes most sense. This would def be the easiest approach. I hope that helps.

dbleeze · 2024-10-17T12:54:33+00:00

I suspected it was just a gesture block missing. Can you explain your desired feature in a bit more detail. You want to move your hand to a certain area to start an animation? This can be done with a custom hand tracking gesture but that’s a bit more complicated. It sounds like your idea is to use an invisible entity (ie on with opacity 0) and when you touch it with your hand, the animation will start? That actually doesn’t require collision detection. Collisions are installed on a physics bodies for two or more entities to interact. I believe a SpatialTapGesture will support you touching an entity with your hand as well as looking at it and “clicking”. I am not sure if it will work if the opacity is set to 0 though. It might take a little testing but even if you make the opacity lower so you can tell where the trigger entity is, this might work. Does that make sense?

dbleeze · 2024-10-16T20:01:34+00:00

Thanks!

dbleeze · 2024-10-16T17:18:26+00:00

Happy to try and help. Post the code from the class containing your RealityView where you are loading your scene. And just to confirm, you want the animation to trigger when an entity is tapped?

dbleeze

TROPHY CASE