One year of blogs

Hard to believe, time really flies. We started this blog almost exactly a year ago, with the goal of writing one post a week. With 66 posts (English, Slovak, or both) we can report we made it!

Yes, some of the posts would benefit from more editing, some were rushed at a Sunday. But as my favorite saying goes, a newspaper will not got to print with blank pages, because a writer had an uninspired day:) Before anyone gets mad, we are not trying to compare ourselves to journalists.

Goal - be helpful

We had a much more pedestrian idea for this blog. Simply talk about the code we write and projects we make as they come up. With the goal to produce something helpful and give back to the developer community. And to help our (potential) customers to get to know us and the things we do.

Just as programming, writing is a creative activity. With programing, it does sometimes feel more natural and the code just flows. Even on a bad day we sit down and code. Obviously, we’ve been cranking out code for decades, so it is not surprising we can get into the Zone much faster. We decided to try the same approach with blogging.

Just sit down and write. How hard can it be? :D

Technical

As you would expect, writing the technical blogs, with code snippets took the least time. That is after the code was cleaned up, tested, debugged and cleaned up some more:) yeah more than one technical blog turned into an in-promptu investigation and the code in the blog is a significant enhancement, over what we originally wanted to publish.

Apps

App introduction posts also mostly wrote themselves. It wasn’t so much creative work as trying to recollect all the important points while building and deploying the apps.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we needed pictures for these posts. As lazy programers we didn’t feel like producing demo data. To be frank, we also dislike marketing-y demo data, it is too neat. There is no organization in the world with 3 customers with 2 contacts each. And they don’t need to see only the company name and logo in the list. Over 20 years, we’ve seen our fair share of neat app designs that were laughably simplified to the point of being useless. (I know, how else can you stick a 50px padding everywhere.) /end of rant.

With the motivating combination of laziness and righteous anger (ok mostly laziness) we went on to build a simple censoring tool - screenshooter. It has some rudimentary image editing capabilities, but most importantly it quickly turns any selected rectangle into a pixelated glob.

One of these days we will try again to power thru the coordinate transform math and cleanup the code enough for a blog post. In the mean time, feel free to use the app and read through the code.

Documentation

The “feature” category of posts was us trying to document some of the more advanced features of our app platform. Such as charts and calendars. Looking at the number of posts, we should make this category a priority, we certainly are not lacking advanced let alone under-documented features:)

Opinions

While we see interest in the opinion blog posts such as web-sql, so far we haven’t got any hate mail. It would be nice to get critical feedback, since these articles were inviting a conversation. Maybe we should bite the bullet and make a comments section.

Non-profit

Our favorite category are our non-profit related posts. While the stories are often sad or even hearth-breaking it gives us great hope to see motivated people at these non-profits chipping away at problems. Problems that might seem too monumental, too gigantic to even approach let alone try to solve. Yet we meet so many individuals who looked at the darkness, shrugged and went to work. And bit by bit, started to fix problems and even created a following. The resilience and courage is inspiring. We also have to say how lucky we feel that we are able help, while at the same time doing things we love to do - build apps.

Wrap

Here are a few number:

90 thousands words is well into the novel category, although to be fair, quite a large chunk of those are code listings.
Nevertheless, it is goal reached and we shall celebrate.

Cheers!