When you’re hitting this post, you likely tried to visit BotPreview, my tool to create previews of Messenger chatbot interactions. After more than three years, I decided to pull the plug and shut it down. If you have been using BotPreview in the past, I thank you for being a user and hope you found it to be useful! Keep reading if you’re interested in why I pulled the plug.
The decade has come to an end, a new one is on it’s dawn. On Twitter, everybody is contemplating about their past decennial. I can’t help but think about the next one. When we’ll wave goodbye the 2020’s on 31/12/2029 (and given that I’ll be lucky enough to see it), I will be 50 years old. Gulp.
The wait has come to an end and it’s quite a relief to finally be able to write about (and promote) something I’ve been involved in my spare time, mainly in 2009 and partly in 2010 as well. In December 2008 I had the pleasure to meet members of the management board of element5, one of the world’s largest outsourcing partners for the software industry, who were just kicking off a new little project: a charting library for JavaScript and Java. My colleague Oliver created the GWT Canvas project which was used for the rendering and I designed most of the project architecture and laid grounds for the available chart types. Unfortunately I had to reduce my involvement in late 2009 due to other personal projects and more responsibilities in my day job and made way for Joern and Andreas as the current main developers, but I’m still part of the development team and a little proud to see the first alpha come to light. The first public release is an alpha version for testing …
I got a bit lazy with my code music list to the right. However, I’m currently addicted to the great music of Parov Stelar (bought three albums at once on iTunes recently, sad I didn’t find him earlier), so I thought I could share some videos. A live example: (I’d love to have this unfortunately unreleased recording.) And a studio mix: Plenty of other tracks are available on YouTube.
Found this in Jeff Bezos’ Princeton Graduation Speech, via TED.
Day #5, Sunday, June 27th. Here’s the rough concept for timed events I already mentioned in my last posting. It’s working for now, but I’ll do some more tweaks to abstract this even further and make it more flexible. Keep reading below if you’re interested in today’s progress. Comments are welcome! In case you missed it, also don’t forget to read the reports on my steps in Android game development: Steps 1-3 and Step 4.
I’m building rather boring enterprise applications at work and I love creating more appealing things in my spare time, so I do a bit of game development whenever I can. The main problem for a programmer is to get some graphics, but fortunately I have some nice renderings from my old Project E tutorial and the even older Project D game by sechsta sinn on my harddisk that I could put into use (all done by my friend and favorite artist Martin Ernst, btw.). This is what I managed to do in three after work sessions so far, if you’re interested in the details, continue reading after the video.
This recording of Steve Jobs is “old” in terms of the Internet, but its message remains cutting-edge. If you don’t know it yet, it’s worth watching. NB: When I watched that the first time, I was surprised that a versed speaker like Jobs told stories of his own life but still had to read them from his notes.
Christopher, one of my highly-paid sechsta sinn colleagues, has spent some of his expensive hours to compile a panorama screenshot of a DVW map. But it all pays off when the fans are happy. Click here for the fully blown version.
One of the best things I did last year around this time was writing ELFrun together with Martin. It was great fun and I think we both really enjoyed it. This year, I have even more pretentious projects but I hardly find the time to sit down and work on them. Sometimes I really want to cocoon myself and eliminate any external influences for hours or days. I guess that’s why I love working at night. I was always working on PCs before and bought my MacBook Pro solely for the purpose of writing an iPhone app. It’s funny how things have changed in the meantime: I bought an HTC Hero, which is an Android phone, meaning I eventually turned away from the iPhone, but I spend most of my time in front of the MacBook Pro and use my PC mainly for playing games. I even consider buying the new 27″ quad-core iMac – if it ever gets a matte screen. Funny how things have changed.