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.

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.

On Saturday, we had a bit of a SHAH ( Super Happy Amy House ) in Clayton so that Mike and I could get together in the same room and taunt each other about the status of our projects. I was able to make some progress on a few of the items that I had on my list for the week but not as much as I had anticipated. The plus side is that I was able to bundle up the debian virtual machine that I am using for development of my project and give it to mike so he didn’t have to do any setup to get a development environment running.

After a couple of hours of working on things we ended up running a D&D adventure with me as the dungeon master. That was a lot of fun and I hope that we can start a regular campaign and maybe get some more people involved as time goes on.

Tasks completed last week :

• hierarchical clients/jobs/projects/services is now all fully functional
• more buildout in the framework to support ideas like super admin
• application administration base screens built out and displayed only to _super admins_
• cleanup of some of the javascript code
• time entry now supports/uses the hierarchical information

Tasks for this week :

• finish account configuration screens admin/user version
• new account setup wizard
• spec out the reports that will be needed for initial release of the site
• AJAX support routines need a little love

Got out for some snowshoeing up at Yuba Gap this weekend. Mike and Weilei brought one of Mike’s coworkers from India along and I took Mom out for her first time snowshoeing. She loved it and is already planning her next trip. It snowed on us most of the trip but the roads were in good shape, the only problem with the driving was the traffic going home. I couldn’t quite understand why there were so many cars on the road until I was informed that this last week was a snow week for a lot of schools so that probably explains all of the traffic.

The next time we go we’re gonna leave early in the morning and see if we can get out for a longer trip, but it’s enough work that I hesitate to take people out for 6 miles on their first day of shoeing.  Some photos are included below to bore those of you who like photos

Got out this weekend for a bit of snowshoeing. My mom bought some snowshoes for Amy and I for Christmas and it was the first weekend that we’ve been able to get out and give them a test run. So Sunday morning we drove up to Roseville REI and picked up a 2010 Sno-Park Pass and then headed up to Donner Pass to do our first run. Parking was easy, and it was just a short walk from the parking lot to the left of Boreal under I-80 to the north where the trail started.  There were a lot of dogs and Brodie didn’t know whether to go and play with them or roll around in the snow. To say he likes snow is an understatement.

We headed up the hill and into a meadow covered with snow. There were trails going everywhere so we opted to follow a trail that meandered through the meadow hoping that it went somewhere interesting. After about 10 minutes the trail left the meadow and started climbing up a hill. Within about 5 minutes of climbing I could definitely feel the altitude but it was just so quiet and peaceful it was worth all of the work. We stopped where we had a bit of a view and shared some water and a Clif Bar and Amy fed Brodie snow.

As we approached the highest elevation we would see for the day, we could look back across the valley and just see the top of Boreal (see image below). We wandered around along the top of the trail looking to see where we could drop back down to the meadow when we caught sight of another trail and were able to move down the hill and come out north of the meadow, after about 10 minutes of walking we were back in the meadow and headed for the car.

I was surprised about how much work snowshoeing was, but the rewards were definitely worth it. We were able to get outdoors and take the dog for a walk and see some really great views. We debated going into Reno for dinner and to see some friends but we got a late start and figured we wouldn’t get home until 10pm if we went to Reno and we both had things that needed to be done before work on Monday. So we dropped back into Auburn, stopped at Ikeda’s for a burger and headed home. Brodie slept in the backseat the whole way home.