Joel Hainley

I’ve been doing a lot of work on personal projects recently. My first iPhone app is almost ready to go to Apple, I’m pretty excited about that. I have a list of  ideas for the next couple of apps for the phone that I want to work through in the next couple of months. The apps aren’t terribly complex but they do build on each other (new libraries, frameworks, etc) so I’ll probably shoot for an app a month for the rest of the year.

Next year I will dig into some bigger apps that I want to work on, by then I should be able in a pretty good space with iOS development. I’ll probably pick up an iPad sometime towards the end of the year and spend some time with it, then perhaps target some apps for it next year. All around should be good stuff.

I also have Android development on my hitlist for this year. I’ll probably work to port each of the iPhone apps that I’m writing to android. Hopefully the learning curve for Android will be similar to the iOS learning curve, I’ve really enjoyed my time with iOS development. I’ve done a ton of java development in my career, so I anticipate Android being pretty straightforward.

The Android developers I’ve talked to are really excited about the platform. I would also like to spend some time and understand about working with Android at the C/C++ layer this would allow for sharing core logic between the iOS and Android apps but I’m not going to shackle myself to that notion without having first spent some time with each of them.

In other news, I’ve almost finished freshening the UI of HamTesting.com, I’m pretty happy with the results. As part of this effort I built out a virtual machine that is a copy of the production server for hamtesting, including the database, so that I can do work on HT when I’m commuting. This has been a huge win for me and I’m looking forward to getting through the list of things that I’ve been wanting to do with HT for a couple of years now.

I’m not sure what the velocity on new features will be, some of them could take a fair amount of time to work through, but I would like to target having a regular release schedule for HT so that it doesn’t get neglected again. Some of the features are really important to the growth of HT so I want to be sure that they are getting done.

I’ve switched over to using git for all of my projects, I setup a server that has all of my source on it, gets backed up every day, etc. I’m really enjoying git so far, although I don’t do a lot of development with others so it’s hard to really appreciate/utilize some of the strongest selling points about git. However, the notion that I can initialize a git repository on a project and work on it locally for a couple of weeks, tracking change, etc. and then easily push it to a server when the project grows legs is just awesome.

I have been entertaining the idea of putting some of my older excursions into coding up on github for consumption by the masses. Though I doubt the masses will have much of an interest, I think it would be kinda cool to have some of the stuff available to a wider audience. Some of the things I’ve been considering posting:

• I wrote the beginnings of an SVG library for .Net, mostly for the creation and drawing of svg documents using .net objects, it was pretty interesting but I got distracted by work related things and the mood has passed me for the time being.
• I also wrote a rails-esque PHP framework (i’m sure everyone has one of these),
• I also have an older framework that I wrote in php that might be of interest to others.
• There is also the ASPForms codebase although I’m not sure I have that laying around anymore. (this was an orm before orms were so trendy, but it understood more than a current orm does)
• picprep which was a pretty fun little utility for processing images from the commandline in a batch sort of way.
• Album Foundry floating around somewhere which was the first time I wrote cross-platform binary file sorts of things. That was a fair amount of fun as well.

Anyways I’ll give it a bit more thought and if I decide to start posting things then as I have time I’ll create repositories on git-hub and start getting some of these things out there.

I’ve started an experiment. I won’t tell you what it is, however I will tell you that it’s a business idea I’ve been wanting to experiment with for a while. It is not related to the iOS development work I’ve been doing that I haven’t talked about here yet. (I’ll do an update on what I’m doing with iOS in a follow-up post sometime soon).

For now, I won’t say much about it, except. I’m trying something. I might reveal a little more about it, if/when it begins to pick up momentum. I probably won’t ever link to the project itself. I’m not entirely sure why I feel this way about it, but I just want to keep it off of everyone’s radar. Well I want people to know I’m up to something, I just don’t want to talk about what that is. Hmm..maybe I should just delete this post.

Stay tuned, so I can be purposely vague with you again. HA!

PS: It’s not morally corrupt or anything, I just don’t wanna get into the details, people can be bummers when you tell them the details of things you’re excited about. So I’ll say this much, it’s a uISV…sorta.

This last Tuesday I received an email from the Toastmaster for Wednesday’s meeting. “There is an opening in the speech schedule, would you like to give your Icebreaker?” My first reaction was “NO” then I realized that this might be the best way to get over my first speech jitters. I’ll only have about 24 hours to worry about all of the things that could go wrong with the speech, what I’ll say, etc. etc. Then I also considered my goal of getting through the Competent Communicator manual this year, and since the schedule is booked full through February I might not have another chance to do my icebreaker until some time in March.

I accepted. However, I had just joined the club the week before so I didn’t have my packet from Toastmasters yet. Thankfully, I borrowed a CC Manual a couple of weeks ago, so I had something to read over so I could prepare for my speech. Reading over the manual during lunch, followed by a little perusing on the internet and thinking about the Icebreakers I’ve seen since I started attending, I finally settled on a topic for my speech.

During my ride home on BART I wrote out a rough draft of my speech. I paid special attention to memorizing my opening couple of sentences, and the conclusion of my speech. While I was riding my bicycle home I actually did my speech out loud and found a couple of awkward spots, so I polished those a bit more. Once I was pretty happy with the speech I started giving it over and over again, thankfully Brodie (the dog) didn’t mind listening to the speech multiple times while I worked on hand gestures, movement, and cleaning up some things that weren’t quite right. During this process of practicing and polishing,  I noticed that my speech came in around 7 minutes 30 seconds.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I really had the speech nailed down, that I realized it was a full minute and a half over my target time.

I considered trimming the speech down to fit within the time allotted but I just couldn’t change much with the speech without really having to rework everything. At 1am the day of the speech I considered my options and decided to just go with the speech as is. If it went over, hopefully it wouldn’t be too much over. I was counting on the fact that being a bit nervous would have me talking somewhat faster than I did during my practice and that the time would “fix itself”. It did, I came in around 5:45. Perfect time. Whew!

The speech itself went well, I was called up, nailed what I nailed in practice, had problems with the things I had problems with during practice. I did my first speech without notes, and overall I’m pretty happy. I’ve started writing speech number 2 just to have it prepared in case another last minute opportunity to speak presents itself. With a bit of hard work, and some luck, hopefully I can finish the CC manual by the end of the year!

It’s been a long while since I’ve updated here. I’ve been doing a small amount of twittering, it’s a bit easier to send out random missives than it is to construct a full blown blog entry of any appreciable size. Today I’m feeling chatty and have noone to talk to besides the dog so maybe this will be an update to remember.

I joined Toastmasters last week and am looking forward to working my way through the Competent Communicator manual. Mike was the inspiration for attending a Toastmasters meeting and after watching people talk for a few weeks I was amazed at how much of an improvement people were making from week to week.

I started riding my bicycle again, I kinda stopped around May for a bunch of personal reasons. However, lately I’ve been missing it somewhat so I’ve started riding again. It’s been good. I can already feel myself getting stronger. It’s nice to have some time each day to be alone with your thoughts and not have a computer in front of you that has a lot of work you could be doing.

I installed iBooks on my iPhone recently and started reading books from Project Gutenberg. I read the second of E.E.Smith’s Skylark novels, and am now working my way through Moby Dick. I’ve found that having a book on the phone has completely killed my desire to play puzzle games on the device. The nice thing about having a book on the phone is that you find all of these great moments to read. Standing in line waiting for food, waiting for bart trains, when a meeting doesn’t start on time, etc. It has been really great in that regard.

Another thing I’ve been doing on the iPhone has been watching lectures from Stanford on iPhone development. This has been really cool and I’m actually pretty close to finishing up the entire cs193p video series. I noticed on hacker news the other day that MIT has some courses and there’s a couple of other podcasts that are educational podcasts so I’ll probably continue to load those on the phone and watch them when I have moments that I can’t get in front of a computer and work.

I’ve been listening to a few development podcasts recently as well, Java Posse, and a few others about different technologies/platforms. This is probably a good thing because the podcasts talk about the latest developments and I gravitate towards working and not geeking out on “what if’s” and the “newest widgets”. So it’s given me some insight into what is happening in the development world in spare moments throughout my day instead of requiring me to dedicate time to learning about the newest craze in dependency injection or whatever the latest thing is.

I’m currently doing some work with Message Driven Beans to replace a sqlexec process and so far it’s going extremely well. I haven’t broken the news to the DBA that we are getting rid of his sqlexec code, but I want to make sure everything is going to work as I expect it will before I fight that battle. MDB’s provide an elegant solution to the problem and constraints that are created by the operational issues revolving around the current solution so hopefully I’ll have something wrapped up this week.

Rock on.

Perhaps I’ll write more about this later, but for now suffice it to say that the 11-05 challenge has been cancelled.