A New Hope

Did I mention before that I write here to collect my thoughts and as writing practice? Well, in any case, after my previous monster post, and given that it’s the start of a new year, I figured I’d do a “New Beginnings” post. Then the sci-fi addict in me awoke and typed “A New Hope“, even though I’m a Trekkie at heart. But I digress.

I wanted to summarize which technologies and experiments I’m most interested in pursuing next. Let me try to list them in order of current preference.

1. Elasticsearch …. and Nest?

Elastic as a (primary?) data store intrigues me. It feels like a second chance for Lucene towards me (experimenting with Solr didn’t “click” for me). There recently was a major version released so it seems like a great time to start investigating. I’m hesitant about Nest though, which you’d kind-of have to use if you want to access Elastic with .NET: during my first few experiments I felt like I was “wrestling” the API.

2. Gulp, or: More Gulp!

I’ve done quite some work with Gulp recently, and it was a very (and surprisingly) fun experience! In the past, most devops tasks felt like chores to me, but not so much with this Gulp. So this point would actually be “More Gulp” (as I’ve done quite a bit of it recently already), but I still have quite a list of things I want to try out, like for instance setting up JSCS.

3. Node

Yes, yes, I know: I’d be a hipster-after-the-fact if I’d start on Node now. Even so, I enjoy writing Javascript, and Node would be a way to do even more of it in my pet projects. Not sure how I would be utilizing Node yet: with ExpressJS, for custom (Gulp) packages, general scripting, or perhaps something like project Euler.

4. Linux

This one’s been on my mind for a while now: perhaps I’ve been stuck too much in my Windows-comfort-zone. It would be good to shape up my base knowledge of Linux as a development environment.

5. Grunt

Why yes, in addition to Gulp there’s also Grunt on this list. Gotta know what’s on the other side of the fence to be able to compare, right?


I’m placing a short but distinct separation here, because these are currently mostly “in reserve” kind of ideas.


6. Couchbase

Working a little with this at work as well. There’s a few things I’d be excited about to try at home, mostly features from version 3 and 4. Would need a “subject” though to make it interesting…

7. Study three-way-diff-tools

For some reason I never got my mind wrapped around these tools. And that’s frustrating. I should just spend a few hours trying to understand the details of these tools… I guess.

8. Raspberry / something IoTish

This one’s on the list because it nags me that I don’t see what all the rage with IoT is (or is it “was”?) about, and for that reason I feel like I have to “make Slackbot call a webhook that calls my webserver that calls my Raspberry which turns on a LED strip and autopilots a drone around in my room”. Or something.

9. Android app

I’m curious how the Android-dev-experience compares to my short experiments from around 2011. This would also allow me to revisit Java. But on a whole I feel I’d have to invest a lot of time or not do this one at all.

10. Closure Compiler

It’s on the list because I find the idea of it intrinsically interesting. It’s low on the list because I’m not sure if I work on things personally or professionally at the moment where this would be worth the investment.


Wow, that worked like a charm! Apologies for the stream-of-consciousness post, but now I do know what to do next! And I’m not even going back to adjust the (order of the) list accordingly, I’m just gonna leave you all hanging out there, guessing at what’s next…

Stack Exchange Challenge: Full-time

I’ve finished my self-imposed Stack Exchange challenge. What a great feeling: finishing things. Only one thing left on my to do list: create a small epilogue. And this is it.

The epilogue is going to be short, using the same format as the half-time post: a wrap up with links to all the bits of this series.

  1. Episode 1: Cooking Stack Exchange Challenge (March 20th, 2012)
  2. Episode 2: Programming Stack Exchange Challenge (April 2nd, 2012)
  3. Episode 3: Gaming Stack Exchange Challenge (May 14th, 2012)
  4. Episode 4: Android Stack Exchange Challenge (June 20th, 2012)
  5. Episode 5: User Experience Stack Exchange Challenge (September 9th, 2012)
  6. Episode 6: DBA Stack Exchange Challenge (October 8th, 2012)
  1. Episode 7: Area 51 Stack Exchange Challenge (May 13th, 2013)
  2. Episode 8: Area 51 Discuss Stack Exchange Challenge (June 30th, 2013)
  3. Episode 9: Meta Stack Overflow Stack Exchange Challenge (August 12th, 2013)
  4. Episode 10: Stack Overflow Stack Exchange Challenge (September 11th, 2013)

And that’s all I have to say about that. Time for a new challenge?

Episode 4: Android Stack Exchange Challenge

Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange

Here’s a short new post in the Stack Exchange Challenge, this time on the relatively new Android Stack Exchange site.

Recently I’ve been mostly lurking on the main Stack Overflow site, incidentally asking or answering a question or two. However, I’m not ready yet to do a post on the main site…yet.

The reason I was triggered to write a new post on the Android sub-domain will become clear in the section with My Questions, below. Let’s have a look at how the site will hold up (compare?) against, say, XDA-Developers.

Current Statistics

Here’s the stats for this relatively new sub-domain:

Fact Android.SE
Questions 7,948
Questions with no upvoted answers 1,309 (16.47%)
FAQ (questions with most links) 2,344
Top 3 questions 134 votes, 115 votes, 98 votes
Questions active last hour 6
All-time rep for top 3 users 30.1k, 15.8k, 15.6k
Meta questions 322

My Questions

At the moment of writing, there’s only one item in my questions on Android Enthusiasts. I wasn’t a regular, in fact I had not visited the site before I figured it was the best place to go with my question:

And there’s the reason I love browsing through the Stack Exchange sites (usually): the percentage of nice and helpful people on those sites is very high! Within the hour someone popped up and wrote a detailed, practical answer. Awesome! And a great incentive to write this post.

My Answers

To be honest: I didn’t spend very much time on the site after asking my question. Before writing this I decided to sit down, do some research, and even help out and answer a question or two if I could. I’m almost too ashamed to post it, but here are the results:

Interesting questions

Here’s a few questions that caught my eye:

After skimming through the first four pages of questions (by votes) I gave up. This site is not for me. The questions aren’t “bad”, but they’re just mainly… boring or trivial.

Community Wiki

The top wiki-style question is (not very unexpected) about changing your phone: how to root it.

Conclusion

This site is not for me. However: it did remind me of how nice the communities on most (if not: all) Stack Exchange sites are!