2018

2018 in review – Focus on Xamarin, RIP UniShare, the rise of crypto and blockchain

2018 in review – Focus on Xamarin, RIP UniShare, the rise of crypto and blockchain

This year, I had some rough time to keep me motivated on writing blog posts. In the early months, I was keeping my target to write about Xamarin Forms and my implementations, but I slowly lost pace around the summer.

Xamarin posts

Within the first half of the year, I was keeping a pretty constant 2 week frame for new blog posts, targeting Xamarin and Xamarin Forms. I touched several topics (some of which may be obsolete since Xamarin Forms 3.x). Here is a short recap:

The rise of crypto and blockchain

Since 2017, I was loosely following the area of crypto currencies and blockchain. This year, however, marks the beginning of a deeper dive into the blockchain area – and of course also into crypto currencies. I am not advising anyone to invest any money into crypto currencies, but there are certain projects out there that are really interesting. Two of them are social networks, similar to Tumblr: Steemit and Trybe. While Steemit is running on its own blockchain, Trybe is utilizing the EOS blockchain. Sadly, the .NET world seems to be widely ignored, so I stepped down a bit from posting on those two. I also tested several other networks running on or with blockchain, but none of them took me like the two mentioned above. If you want to learn more about the crypto currencies/projects I am interested in, just head over to my crypto page.

Open Source

Even if I did not made a lot of sound around it, I have worked on some libraries this year. I am not going into detail on every one, just head over to my Github:

I am currently working on another library (targetting crypto payments) – I will write about it once it is ready to be used in your projects.

RIP UniShare

One of the sadest moments this year was the death of UniShare, my most popular Windows (Phone) app. Long story short, due to some changes Facebook made to their API, I had to take UniShare to its funeral at the end of October. Read more about it here.

Looking forward to 2019

In 2019, I will continue my journey within the crypto/blockchain world. Like I wrote above, I am working on a crypto related project at the moment, which I hope to have ready in the early weeks of 2019. One of my other projects, WindowsUnited, will be taken over by another developer in 2019 (because he can invest more time into their official apps and work form them more ore less exclusively). This will free up some recsources, which I am trying to invest in my other projects and the rise of my blogging pace (again).

Thanks to all of you for reading my posts this year. I hope you’ll be with me in 2019 as well. I wish all of you a good arrival in 2019 and a happy new year once it arrives.

Until the next post, happy coding, everyone!

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 0 comments
Saying Goodbye to 2017 [Editorial]

Saying Goodbye to 2017 [Editorial]

First Half

The first half of the year I wasn’t much into development besides work. I was asked to help building a new German Android news site, which turned out to be an impossible task because of several reasons (high author fluctuation was the baddest thing). In the end, the owners decided to go another route by turning the side into a a site dedicated to Chinese hardware, which is an area I do not have a lot of trust and interest. So I decided to step out of the project and focus again on my software development efforts.

Back to software development (Second Half)

The first thing I was focusing on in that area was to get deeper into web development with ASP.NET Core. I learned a few basics from Pluralsight and started to work on a project that I will (hopefully) bring forward in 2018.

I also got back deeper into cross platform development with Xamarin, especially Xamarin.Forms. As Microsoft killed all mobile efforts in the UWP, this step was one I denied way too long to go. As a logic step  I started with my ongoing series of blog posts about Xamarin Forms and the MVVMLight toolkit. If you missed it, here are the links to the posts:

During the first 8 month of the year, I was running Android as my daily driver. However, I never was really happy with the Android OS (and I am still not), so I decided to switch to the iPhone 8 Plus after its launch. I detailed the reasons why here:

Why I am (once again) using an iPhone [Editorial]

In the last month, I was also looking into some IOT development, and this is were my current focus is. In the next few weeks I have a private project that overlaps with a project at work. I really appreciate it when I can be productive in multiple ways, and those (sadly rare) overlapping projects are just plain awesome to work on.

Private things…

Having a look at my private goals (for those who care), I started with some functional fitness workouts in late summer. I am using the workout app from Skimble, which has some handy video guides and is way cheaper than a gym subscription. In 2018, I want to move on to get even more fit. On top, one of the biggest (and probably hardest) goal is to become a non-smoker. I am hoping that being more active has motivating impacts on the later goal as well. On top, in the last few days I had my first baby steps into meditation as well, but I am still struggling with that one. So, way to go in these parts of my life.

Well, this post is not as long as the ones of the years before, but I really already told you everything that happened this year. To close this post, I wish you all a happy end of the year, an awesome party tonight and I hope to welcome you all again in 2018 here on my personal blog.

Happy new year, everyone!

Posted by msicc in Dev Stories, Editorials, 0 comments