LIFE. IS. PAIN.
I have been approached by a lot of people that want to know how to get established as an iPhone developer, or how to get good at kung fu. There is only one way that I know of to do it:
You’ve got to do it, on your own time, every day, until you can’t stand it anymore.
Everyone that I know that is good at this kind of thing has spent a *lot* of time investing in themselves to get good. Mike Lee moved into Wil Shipley’s basement and worked for him for free for a year. Andy Dale practiced for 7 hours a day, and made a point of tracking down the best martial arts teachers he could find in order to perfect his art as much as possible.
As for myself, I got into programming by learning to write computer games, on my own time, while going to college full time and working two jobs. I taught myself Java in my scant off-hours while working on software for the Mars Surveyor Program. Finally, I started developing my own Cocoa applications while I was doing full time Java development.
If you want to get good at something, you have to put in the time and invest in yourself. We occasionally run into people that would like to do iPhone development, but expect the company to pay for the time it takes them to learn the basics.
This isn’t ever going to happen. If you don’t care enough about your craft to invest in it yourself, we certainly aren’t going to.
