Recent Blog Posts

Open-Source Challenge An attempt at increasing my open-source portfolio via small monthly projects.

I decided a fun challenge for myself in 2012 would be to try and improve my work on open-source projects. It would allow me to continue to sharpen my skills, contribute to the developer community, and hopefully provide some badass apps to end-users. I plan on doing this two ways:

• Create at least one open-source project a month. This could be something simple, like a convenient command-line Python script, or an Android app, or a cool Javascript tool, etc.

• Contribute to at least 3 big existing open-source projects this year. The nature of open-source and awesome tools like git (and more specifically, GitHub) encourage and facilitate collaboration. I’d love to leave my mark on a few interesting projects.

So there it is. I don’t believe in new year’s resolutions, but I suppose this is similar. And my project for January? It may be cheating but… it’s this website.

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CPU Spy Hits 150,000 Downloads The first major Android app I published hits the 150,000 download mark.

What’s the best part about developing awesome apps? Seeing them used and appreciated by the end users. In my opinion, seeing your target audience embrace and get great use out of an app is the ultimate testament to its success.

My first major venture into developing for Android, a small utility program called CPU Spy, hit the 150,000 downloads mark yesterday. After 150,574 downloads, 1,225 comments, and 996 five-star ratings, it has become an important tool for Android enthusiasts looking to keep an eye on their CPU governor or diagnose battery-drain issues.

Since it’s initial release, I’ve had a lot of fun watching its (purely organic) growth via the developer console graphs and Google search results. It was even featured in an article on the popular XDA-Developers site, which was particularly cool for me since I had been a regular user there for some time.

So, what’s the next step? I will be releasing an improved “plus” version of the app that shows more system information, allows logging, and features some big fat graphs showing CPU state transitions over time. Look for it soon in the Android Market!

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Jekyll and Git My workflow thus far for blogging with Jekyll and versioning with git.

Jeykll is awesome, and git is awesome. Combining them yields a frothy mix of intense geeky appeal and hacker fun. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I’ve yielded to the recent trend of hosting my personal site via a static-site generator, fed some really basic markdown files and layouts, and of course all kept organized and versioned via git.

So far, this is what is settling down to be my workflow:

• Make all design and site layout/template changes on the master branch. This means the change log on master will just show site platform changes.
• Commit drafts, blog posts, and other content creation on the drafts branch. This allows all the content stuff to stay in one place.
• The deployed site will be kept on the live-site branch. I’d like to eventually script in some sort of post-commit hook so pushing to this branch would automagically publish to the web.

So, if I want to sit down and write some posts, I’ll commit freely and often to drafts, and when finished, cleanup the commits and merge into the live-site branch. I can do the same thing for master with design changes, but I’d run a git merge --no-ff in order to preserve the current master branch that isn’t cluttered with all of my posts.

The end result is a clean master commit history that only shows changes to the actaully site and not all of my various content commits.

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Hello, World! My triumphant return to the world of blogging.

After an exceptionally long break from blogging, I’ve decided to once again return. Thanks mostly to reading about an awesome blog generator known as Jekyll, a project created by GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Warner that seems to be the flavor of the week for developers/hackers wanting to throw up a personal site. It seems Jekyll is getting all these programmers’ panties in a wad because it’s dead simple, command-line friendly, and synergises exceptionally well with git (or any version control system, as updating is done by creating plain-text markdown files).

So, as any true Linux geek, I’ll be updating from the command line by creating my posts in vim and checking them into a git repo. I’ll probably end up writing a few scripts to automate some of the process of creating new posts and committing in git as well– because hey, I wouldn’t be a real Linux user if I didn’t write a script for every damn little thing.

You can check out this site’s project page for implementation details. As for content, I plan on blogging about the usual personal ramblings and reflections, but this time hope to include more technical discussions, tutorials, and how-to write-ups with technologies and programming languages that interest me. There will also be a projects section that I will post whatever follies I’m working on (or have worked on in the past).

There is still a decent number of features I still need to implement, such as a blog archive page (no point until I get a few written though), a commenting system, analytics, and maybe some more interesting design choices… but I think half the fun will be making this damn site.

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