programming

21
Dec
2022
My annual review (2022) [Editorial]

My annual review (2022) [Editorial]

In the beginning of 2022, I would never have thought of such a turbulent year. After all, we went more or less over the pandemic, and there were at least some positive signs that were sparking some hope. Pretty fast, the year turned into a memorable one, but for very ugly reasons.

Ukraine war

Russia began a war in Ukraine. We all have to battle the consequences of this war. Because of the ongoing war, prices of living have raised in all areas, be it groceries, energy costs and also entertainment costs. No day passes by without getting notified about the horrible things Russian troops are doing in Ukraine. I still pray (and you should too, if you’re into that) for the war to be finally over soon.

Twitter take-over

The second impacting event was the take-over of Twitter by Elon Musk. While he made Tesla a profitable company by focusing on the product outcome and made space travel less expensive with SpaceX, he is currently about to destroy Twitter. While I still was somehow neutral back in April when the deal became more real, I lost hope for my favourite social network the day he fired half of the company’s staff.

At the time of the take-over, I was actively working on my app TwistReader, which was a reader app for Twitter lists. I had already a beta running on TestFlight when things began to turn bad on Twitter. After UniShare (which was in the process of being ported to Android and iOS when it died), I had to take the though decision to let go also this app. I cancelled the domain I bought for the app and shut down all Azure resources already. If someone wants to continue the project, I am open to talk about it.

TwistReader promotional image

This is now the second time I had to stop an app for social media. Ultimately, I decided I will not develop against any of the social networks from now on (even though I have several ideas to improve my social flow).

As we all know, things on Twitter aren’t becoming better. My presence on the bird site serves now solely as a guide to other social media I am active on. I decided to not delete my two main accounts, but to lock them for new followers, and stopped using the service. I am mostly active on Mastodon, followed by LinkedIn (although the later one needs some more attention).

NASA is flying to the moon again

Besides all the negative stuff, there were also some good news for all of us space fans. The NASA finally sent a space-ship to the moon again. They are playing the save game and did an unmanned launch, letting the capsule orbit the Moon and come back to Earth. They made some really awesome photos along the way, and the mission was a full success.

orion space-ship with moon and earth
Image by NASA

New blog series #CASBAN6

Besides working on TwistReader, I also started to port my portfolio website away from WordPress to a self written website in ASP.NET Core with Razor pages. The site itself is already published, with links to my apps in the stores, but the news section still needs a blog. I evaluated all the options, like existing CMS plugins and other blogging platforms.

In the end, I opted into learning something new by using some bits of what I already know – and I started my recent #CASBAN6 blog series about creating a serverless blog engine on Azure. This is now my main side project.

Other dev stuff

While I am focusing on the serverless blog engine, I also have some libraries I made and use internally for Xamarin.Forms that I need to port to .NET MAUI. Some parts can be easily removed and replaced with Essentials and CommunityToolkit. There is still plenty of code worth porting left, though.

At work, I broke up the internally used libraries to be more modular and finished implementing the service templates that use them. I also continued to push source control management within the team. Besides that, I wrote some interfaces for our customers that took advantage of these things, but needed additional items as well. Over all, I was able to use some of my learnings at work and vice versa.

I also decided to not cancel my Parallels subscription. I used it around 10 time throughout the year, which is not worth paying more than 100 bucks for the yearly licence.

Furthermore, I will use the freed budget to buy a Jetbrains Ultimate licence instead, which I started to use recently. The experience in writing code is far ahead of what Microsoft offers with Visual Studio on Mac, so I guess that’s a good investment.

Sports

If you have been following along for some time, you may know that I only became a non-smoker again (after 25 years of chain-smoking) two years ago. In terms of sports, I took part in three challenges this year (Run4Fun 6,8km, 10km at Winterthur marathon and Kyburglauf 2022 10.3 km (including 425 stairs just at the end of km 10). If you want to follow my running adventures, you can find me here on Strava.

Me running the 10 km at Winterthur Marathon 2022

Outlook into 2023

Next year, the roller coaster continues to ride. I will start a new role in March as a .NET mobile developer at Galliker Switzerland, which is one of the leading companies in logistics. They have a Xamarin.Forms code base and started the transition to .NET MAUI. There will be projects where I will have to do API and Web stuff as well, so this new position will help me to move towards my goal of becoming a full stack .NET developer as well. Another plus is that I am free to choose my preferred IDE – which will be most probably RIDER after my recent experiences with it.

Of course, I will continue to with my #CASBAN6 project as well. As I stated in my last post in the series, the Azure functions part is coming up next. I will have some posts on that topic alone, but I will also keep developing it further until the final product is ready to be used in production.

Besides that, I will start to port my Fishing Knots app to .NET MAUI, which will help me to learn the upgrade process and make the app ready for the future.

In terms of sports, I will continue with running, starting up with a focus on improving my average pace to get permanently below 5 min/km. On top of that, I want to run a half-marathon at the end of the next season. I will give runningCoach another try – hopefully they will be able to import my Strava results correctly this time.

Conclusion

What was your 2022 like? What are you all looking forward in 2023? Feel free to get in contact via my social media accounts or the comments section below.

What’s left is to wish all of you a

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 0 comments
18
Jun
2019
How to host a code file on Github as Gist to use in your application

How to host a code file on Github as Gist to use in your application

What the h*** is a Gist?

In case you never heard of Gist, it is an easy to use way to share code files hosted by Github. Everyone with a user account can use this feature, and now that also the premium features are free (thanks to the acquisition by Microsoft), you can even share them secretly.

Where do I find my Gists?

This one is for the beginners. If you know this already, move on. Once you have logged into your Github account, click on your user name. This will open a menu where you can see an option called ‘Your gists’. Once you clicked that one, you will see a page similar to mine (maybe with no gists in it):

gist_overview_gists

How to create a new Gist?

Well, that’s pretty easy. You just click on the ‘+’-button besides your user avatar in the top right corner:

gist_menu_add_new

This will bring up a new gist window. Enter your description, file name and fill in the content of your file or even add more files and hit the ‘Create public gist’ button to create your new gist. If you intend to host multiple files in your gist, please note that you will need the following steps on every single file you add (as each one has its own url).

gist_add_new

How to use this Gist in my app?

Luckily, both files in Github repos as well as in gists can be viewed in the so called ‘Raw’ view. You will find a corresponding button on every code file in the top right corner. Click on it, and you will see a plain-text representation (here is a sample from the one that led to this block post. It is styled by a browser extension that makes json more readable (every developer should already have one of this type installed, btw)):

gist_raw_view

Now we are close to be able to fetch this file into our applications. If you are sure that this file will never change, just use this file. If you know that this file is subject for future changes, you will need to perform a little trick.

Getting always the latest version of our Gist

If you analyze the url, you will notice that there is a unique id between the ‘raw’ part and the file name:

gist_remove_this_id

This id represents the current revision of your Gist. To make sure we always get the latest version of our gist, we need to remove this id. The url must end with ‘raw/yourfile.extensions‘, as you can see here:

gist_always_latest_revision_url

This way, you can update the file and implement an update mechanism into your app that fetches always the latest revision of that file. To fetch the file content into your app, you just need to perform a GET request against that url, without the overload of using Github’s API.

Conclusion

Instead of hosting configuration or data files on a private web server, one can utilize existing infrastructure like the one of Github. Like always, I hope this post will be helpful for some of you.

Until the next post, happy coding, everyone!
Posted by msicc in Dev Stories, Xamarin, 1 comment
31
Dec
2015

Review of 2015–my first year in Switzerland

2015 was once again a year where a lot happened. My year began with the start of a new job – I am now employed as a full time developer at the Swiss Shareholder register ShareCommService AG. The first days in Switzerland where full of trouble, as I needed to start from scratch in a new country. I found a room in a shared appartment, which was quite ok for me alone. Internet, phone, insurance, pass port – these were the things I had to do in the first weeks besides learning all the new things that you usually do when entering a new company.

timerarmvvmAs part of my new job, it was also heavily demanded that I finally get deeply into MVVM. I always read a lot about that, but avoided it because I wanted to get things done in my private projects. My MVVM learning project was a WPF timer app that supports resuming, multiple timers and more. I learned it in the only right way: without any frameworks/toolkits, which helps a lot to understand what is going on. Needless to say that I am happy to be past this point, as we are using MVVM Light a lot in our LOB applications. LOB (Line-of-Business) applications are different from what I have done before. They are used only internally and directly affect our daily business. I also learned more about SQL and databases, and also SignalR took a big part of my learning curve.

I have the luck to learn from Roman Müller, who has a gigantic amount of experience in programming and also has always some funny programming story to tell from his past. Together with Reto, the second programmer in our team, he teached me a lot – not only programming things, but also better ways to analyze and think about situations where you can end in programming. I am really thankful to be part of this team. Our system administrator Stefan, which I like to refer as a ‘BOFH with the heart on the right place’, makes the team complete.

During the year, I participated also in several Annual General Meetings (AGM) of our customers. This was very helpful for me to understand my new job, as we are responsible for all things regarding the votings on their agenda.

My first private project this year was to rewrite Voices Admin as a universal (Windows 8.1) app. Of course I did it as plain MVVM app, and it helped me a lot to get even deeper into it, and also boosted my learning curve in my daily job. I updated my UserVoice library as well to be fully portable in the meantime. Currently, I am working on the UWP version of UniShare.

voices admin

My family stayed in Germany for several private reasons in the first month of the year. Beginning in August, we moved completely to Switzerland. I am happy that we passed this point as my family is very important to me and is giving me a lot of power. I have to thank my wife and also both of my kids for their understanding, as being a programmer is often very time consuming.

I also discovered a completely new area: the Internet of Things. With the Rasperry Pi2 supporting the Windows 10 IoT Core, I played around with it, learned a few new things about building hardware – and build a prototype for internal testings.

raspi2proto

You see, I had a year full of action, and I tried to make this post as short as possible. I am looking forward to 2016, where my developer story will continue. I did also blog only a few things this year, and I am trying to keep things up and post more frequently next year.

For now, I whish everyone all the best for the end of this year and also for 2016!

Posted by msicc in Editorials, 0 comments