2010 July

Doing Something

Earlier this year, after realising I spent a lot of my time at home watching average TV shows and surfing the net, I started to make an effort to become more of creator than a consumer. I’ve always had ideas of things I’d think were cool or useful, but never actually got around to doing anything about them. Most of them involved tech, most were well within my skill level to accomplish, nothing happened.

So here’s a look at some personal projects that I’ve been thinking about doing but never really got around to…

• Building an Android application for interfacing with your Powershop account
  
  This is what I’ve been doing recently. Learning about Android application development and filling a hole for an application that I, and others, would find useful. The code is 75% done, but there’s lots of tweaks to be done before I’ll be happy with it. Considering releasing this as open source, but not 100% sure yet
• Doing an awesome case mod
  
  Will hopefully have the case here this weekend – It’s going to be awesome… watch this space
• Blog some more
• Build some useful web applications – i.e. an application that allows a household to split bills between flatmates, an application that analyses you’re phone bill and suggests a better plan or carrier to save you money
  
  Both of these have working prototypes, written in Rails. It quickly got complicated and I started running into Rails’ limitations. Would love to get this going and learn some new languages!
• Practice web design
  
  Although I consider myself a competent developer, I find that design and UX is my weak point. I’d love to develop this weakness and grow my skills
• Redesign my blog
  
  Something original and simpler. I find that my blog is far too complicated for what it actually is, so much so I can sometimes find it distracting when I actually do want to write. Also I want to look at re-implementing it with a new platform such as Jekyll or Hyde
• Grow my on-the-side business
  
  As I’ve had a lot of experience with web development and Linux server management, I’d love to help people who need someone to take care of it for them, or possibly even consult.

Also, since this is me, I had to set myself some rules. The most important one is: Don’t start a new project until the one your working on is done. Without that, I’d probably start them all and finish none…