Next Few Posts

It's late so I'm going to cheat a little bit tonight and make a meta-post about my upcoming posts. When I started my job as a consultant at Art & Logic, I came in expecting to write code a majority of my working hours. After a couple of projects, it became clear that client/project management was also a pretty big part of the job, especially when working as a solo developer on a project.

Over the past year and a half, I've had the opportunity to manage teams of people on some pretty large projects. Before I started at Art and Logic, had you told me I'd be a project manager, I would have asked you to put me out of my misery now. My thoughts on project management/managers were too similar to Dilbert cartoons.

However, I've really enjoyed learning project management and I feel that I'm getting better at it each project. My next couple of posts will talk about some of the experiences I've had and lessons learned while starting out in this new role.

Beginner JavaScript Trick

So this trick is probably old-hat for any experienced JavaScript programmer, but the problem it solves tripped me up when I first started using JavaScript in depth. I was maintaining code written by another developer and at the beginning of every JavaScript module he wrote he would always have the following line:

var that = this;


I didn't really understand the point of it at the time until I later ran into a frustrating bug where this wasn't pointing to the (top-level) object I thought it should. Sure enough, it was because I was referring to this within an event handler and this was pointing to the target of the event rather than the top-level object. The light bulb went off in my head. So whenever you want to refer to your top-level object, you can just reference that and use this everywhere else. This article provides a good explanation of the issue.

Sometime later, I was watching Douglas Crockford's JavaScript lectures on Yahoo and saw that he uses the same technique. Unfortunately, those videos are no longer available on Yahoo.

Software project ideas

While testing my new iPhone app, I completed a 7-day trial to brainstorm three new mobile app ideas per day. When Apple says "there's an app for that" they're not kidding. Coming up with an original idea is pretty close to impossible. I wasn't limiting myself to original ideas and even searched the the app store to see if there were any ideas I could improve on. But any simple ideas have likely been done.

For example, on the weekend of my trial, Max and I camped out at my in-laws and we toasted marshmallows. "Aha!" I thought. That would be a good gimmicky app (I was going for quantity here, not quality). Searching for marshmallow on the app store didn't turn up anything. But the next day it hit me I didn't search for s'mores and sure enough...there's an app for that.

I did think of a couple of apps that don't seem to be in the store but they would require nice graphics and I'm not looking to do anything where I'd have to hire someone to do that work.

By far the ideas I thought were best were apps for existing companies/entities to supplement their current offerings. I have several ideas now for apps for local businesses/friends . When I get some free time I'm definitely planning on approaching some people to see if they're interested.

30 Days to Success

This week Apple approved my iPhone app 30 Days to Success, which is an application based on Steve Pavlina's article of the same name.

I've had the idea for this app for several years now and actually developed a prototype 2 years ago. I emailed Steve to see if he would be interested in the app but he declined. So I dropped the idea not wanting to infringe on his copyrights.

But late last year Steve released all copyrights to his online content so I decided to start the project back up.

Back in the prototype phase, I had created my own hideous calendar UI. After stopping work on the project, I ran across the Kal library when doing some estimates at my day job and and knew that was something I would have to integrate. So with a better looking UI and some updates to integrate Facebook and Twitter, I thought I had something that was worthy of release. There are a couple of things I'm still not happy with but I will fix them over time.

I'm not expecting too much income from the app although I'm hoping to make a little bit of passive income off of it in the long run. I think I have a couple of things going for me:
- I can take advantage of Steve Pavlina's already large audience.
- Integration of Facebook and Twitter will put the app in front of a lot more eyes.
- I'm planning some other social features that should encourage current users to get others involved with the app.

I had one sale the first day and two sales the second day. Assuming this exponential growth rate continues, I'll be at a million sales in no time :)

Day 1 of 30

In honor of the release of my new iPhone app to the iTunes store, I am going to try and complete a 30 day trial to write something here every day.

I've queued up about 10 topics I'd like to write about so I should be good to go for at least the first week and a half.

And with that, Day 1 is a success ;)

New Hobby

One of my favorite classes in college was the Digital Logic class where we had to design basic computer circuitry. Then this year I read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software and again, was just engrossed in all of the gates, adders and multiplexers. I really am clueless when it comes to a lot of this stuff but always wanted to get some hands-on experience.

I first found about the Arduino project from the July 2010 issue of PragPub. Then a couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned that he bought an Arduino and was fooling around with it so I decided to take the plunge too.

Like my friend, I ended up purchasing the SparkFun Inventor's Kit for Arduino, which comes with some basic parts and project schema to get you started.

Here is a video of my son and I with our first project to light up some LEDs:

New Home Page

I've been doing a lot of work on Google App Engine lately and finally registered a domain name for myself at ryan-brubaker.com. It's probably a little bit of overkill to use GAE for a personal site but I just find it easier. I'm going to use that page to start putting up code samples, keep track of books I've read and anything else that strikes my fancy.

I'll still be using blogger to host my blog, which after a year of silence, I hope to get back on track again. This past year has been a busy year for me and I have a lot of things I'd like to write about.

And for a little vanity note, I'm now listed on the Developer Testimonials page on the Art & Logic website: Art & Logic Careers (click the Developer Testimonials tab).