Heaton park

We’ve had an influx of work in the past few weeks at the lab and the work load is becoming a little fucking crazy :S to say the least.

Its all good though coz I thrives under this kind of pressure. Plus the key project I’m on at the minute is an iPhone / iPad app which is turning out to be fucking beautiful. The backend is driven by a CMS and the app pulls that shit right in vi XML and iCal ;) 

The frontend is a totally bespoke UI and I’ve relished in designing the UI layer. Its implemented in openGLS and cocos2d although I’ve worked around the out of the box cocos templates as I didn’t find them to be as accommodating to my components design as I needed. Suffice to say, Although the visual design was not my own, I feel that the attention to detail I’ve put into the UX has produced a pretty tasty UI experience. 

Unfortunately, for the next week at least, I’, going to have to shelve my excitement and turn my attention to another project.. ..an awesomely massive Drupal portal which should be fun to get my OCD teeth into ;)

* I’m sick of waiting for full HTML5 and CSS3 support across all browsers. Yes, people have been using it for a good while now and as it seems most IE users are finally getting their act together and shifting their shit to 8 (and 9). Its likely that sometime soon we should all be in a position to putting out some awesome websites but don’t hold your breath!

* I don’t have time to update my own website. I wish I had all the time in the world to work on a website skin but I dont! I’m too busy making money. I’m no designer but I’m pretty nifty with fireworks and after 8 years doing this shit I like to think I’ve got some HTML fu! Even if I did though.. ..I’m sick of banging out HTML. ‘ADHD + To Many Projects’ means I’d likely never be happy with the end result and / or finish it for that matter so its best I leave it there.

* I’m not a web designer / developer / deseloper.. ..I’m a software engineer. *translation - I get hard looking at patterns*. Not the knitting kind though! No! The ‘I’ve just cracked open omnigraffle and puked a dirty great class diagram’ kind! In fact I’m not even that! I’m a guy with a pad of ideas who tinkers with things. I want to make cool things. I dont want to be confined to the saturated arena of ‘up your own arse’ script kiddies. Its just the web! its just a document!

* Its getting to easy to put together awesome tools using the web, through the web and If you’ve thought of it, its probably already been done.. twice.. and done pretty well. The webs came along way in only the past three years. Its getting easier than ever to put these things together. If your’e not steeped in cash, or sucking investor dick, then your’e not going to be the cool kids ramping this shit out! sorry!

* I’m sick of the social web. I’m neither social or antisocial. I like to catchup with friends face to face for a meal or a drink. I dont want to be harassed hourly with your verbal garbage. Dont boggle me with your enigmatic wall posts! I’m, not interested in what your’e eating and the 40th set of pictures you’ve just uploaded of your <insert annoying obsession here> makes me want to rip out my eyes and eat my own face. 

With that said, I’ve decided this year to:

1) Stop using twitter.  A few months back I deactivated my facebook account. Wow! Liberating + 1 :) Sorry twitter, you’ve lost me. The people I follow are great but personally, I think your’e a big waste of my time. I just don’t get you anymore. Give me something new :( oh! and eat my balls!

The same goes for Gowalla, Foursquare, GetGlue, etal.

2) I’m not interested in doing websites any more. They bore me! I havent got time to keep up with the latest javascript framework or the latest “Works in them all” web templates and frankly I couldn’t care less. I’ll use what I need to to get the job done. When I need to, I’ll build websites. I’ll build them well. I’ll use best practices, do a stella job and never cut corners. I’ll continue to build them as long they’re are bringing in the cash.

3) My true passion is software design. The web is a glorified frontend! (and a very fickle one at that). From now on my interweb efforts will be better put to building websites that work and no more. No fluff or cruft. The internet is an awesomely powerful tool but their are other ports and other protocols *remember that kids!*. Port 80’s been in the lime light to long. Next!

4) My new distraction is mobile! Mobile and API’s.. Distributed Architectures.. Rest, JSON, RPC.. ..thats where my direction will be. Connecting things! Its like lego but betterer

5) My true focus is hedgehog lab. We’ve got an awesome team of talented people and we can do great things. We’re moving into a truly exciting space. This is where the future is!

6) I’m going to start brewing my own cider. The Scrumpy kind. Its become too pricey and for £4.50 I can get about a 10 litre vat full to the brim. Good Times!

Apart from a few additional annoyances, todays been rather cheery.

.. Thats all.

• Unweaving The Rainbow - Richard Dawkins
• The Odyssey Of Homer (For The Lulz)

Its not until you see the level of work you push out in four hours that you realise that the Ritalin is taking effect. I’m always surprised an hour into my work, just how productive I have actually become and how much focus I have on a task.

My impulsive tendencies to procrastinate subtly fades replaced by a high level of interest in getting the important complete.. ..a level of calm that makes the sometimes overwhelming depth of a problem clear and approachable.. ..a sharp level of focus that makes completing the mundane, effortless. 

When the fog creeps back in and the mind becomes fuzzy, when the urge to defer the boredom and seek out distractions increases, thats when you know your’e due your next fix

Really fascinating rendition of the super mario theme by the london symphony orchestra. Catchy ;) 

I spent a couple of hours this weekend putting together an appengine app to hook into the fixx api. I chose appengine for two reasons: First off, its python and i’m aching to do some python. Our website runs with python and although I put most of the frontend together, I’ve had little say or involvement in the backend. Its all django based which is sweet, but its too far developed now for it to necessitate my input. Secondly, I’m loving the cloud at the minute. google appengine has some sweet infrastructure in place that I really wanted to start tinkering with and as its a bare bones API, it gives me a lot of scope to make something new.

Anyway.. ..So I spent a bit of time a few months back putting together a php wrapper for fixx 1.9 and I’ve only used it in a few places to pull out some arbitrary data into my website but I’ve never really touched it since. It was more of a “Can I Do This?” kind of project. However, reading through the appengine API, the XMPP services immediately caught my eye.

It took about two hours to setup a google app, configure the routes using the google web framework, knock together a few templates and port enough of the fixx API to get out the data I needed to have a prototype notification system in place. Once I had the app pulling data from fixx, pushing it out using google XMPP api was a breeze.

The result? A sweet little chat bot that notifies you when issues have been assigned to you ;)

The current version is a very early prototype, is bound to break at some point and needs a lot of love frontend but still, its possible to register your copy of fixx using a public domain name and allow anybody for that domain to sign in and subscribe to notifications.

The roadmap is a bit up in the air at the minute but the long term goal is to have a bot that will keep you informed of changes to fixx and allow you to pull and push information to and from your fixx instance. The long term goal is to allow commands to be fired at it, for example :

/comment 238 I’ve finished working on this * To comment on an issue *

or

/log 838 2:40 added some awesomeness * To log time *

or

/resolve  882 duplicate This issue is a duplicate

..You get the idea ;)

When I’ve got a better idea of the features I’m going to add, I’ll publish a roadmap and drop the code on a google repository. For now, if your’e interested let me know and I’ll make a copy available for download.

While I’m waiting for the ritalin to kick in, I normally find a bit of bluegrass gets me in the zone.

BlueGrass Mix.. ..enjoy :P