This was 2013 and plans for 2014!

It's this time of the year again, reviewing the cool things that happened, learning from the stuff that didn't go as planned and adjusting the goals of last year accordingly.

2013 was busy, here are some achievements :

• visited FOSDEM 2013 and did a talk on phpMyAdmin
• visited Newline 0x03
• co-organised a GSoC info session at UGent
• first Wagner experience : Parsifal, long but musically beautiful
• phpMyAdmin is accepted as a mentoring organisation for GSoC 2013 and has 6 students. I'll be a co-mentor and co-org admin this year
• got promoted to a higher pay grade
• did a citytrip to Berlin, visited LinuxTag 2013 and moderated a few sessions. I've also got some ideas for my Android app while attending the Android session.
• finished a few yellow routes at Bleau.
• did some outdoor rock climbing in Fontainebleau.
• did a presentation introducing Latex to my colleagues.
• visited Debconf13 held in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, were phpMyAdmin had a team meeting and did a phpMyAdmin tutorial.
• went to GSoC Mentor Summit 2013 at Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California, organised a Key Signing Party and  a session on international acceptance of Open Source licenses.
• did some climbing in Yosemite National Park
• released GetBack GPS, my first Android app
• prepared sabayon for the first time.
• made more than 2000 contributions (commits and created issues) in one year on github.
• travelled to the Philipines.

Check out my plans for 2014 :

• Android app development : After releasing an Android app this year for the first time, I plan to explore this path a bit more. Improving the GetBack GPS app a bit more, I still have some ideas as you can see on the roadmap, getting some more experience on automated testing, test driven development (TDD), Java and object oriented programming along the way.
  Another Android project for this year will use Bluetooth communication, in a small project I will work on with a friend.
• Bouldering/climbing : Last year I started climbing in the gym and I did some outdoor climbing as well. I utterly enjoy this, so I definitely want to spend some more time on it. Hopefully with some outdoor climbing trips during the upcoming year.
• Visit FOSDEM and LinuxTag.

I'm looking forward to an exciting year.
I wish you and your family the same, with good health and successful projects.

First Android app

This week I released GetBack GPS, my first Android app, day to day one year after the first commit that started the development.

During this year, I put my newly acquired Java skills to use, explored the huge possibilities of the Android framework, and experimented with Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration.

The result so far is a simple navigation app, called GetBack GPS, that helps you find your way back to a previously visited location, using the GPS functionality of your Android device.
You can get it at F-Droid, a website that distributes Open Source software.

The app is Open Source, freely available and it does it what it is supposed to do. If it doesn't, please report an issue. ;)


So what's next? First some small improvements to the interface, some refactoring and creating a class to make rotating of the arrow easier.
Increasing the test coverage is on my list as well, but I have to figure out a way to automatically test the app, with my current setup (maven, cobertura, junit3, Jenkins, Travis CI, coveralls). I might have to make some changes to the setup to get coverage from instrumentation tests.
Unit testing classes that extend (or use) Android classes, is not possible, because the Android API is an just an interface, the implementation of the classes is only present in the System Images of Android devices. So to test the actual implementation, you need to test on an actual or emulated Android device.

Some future ideas for the app:

• store multiple locations, from which you can choose when you set a destination
• support both the metric and imperial system
• share your location with others and use the current location of a friend as a destination

More ideas can be found in the milestones.

I also plan to work on some other Android projects that will use Bluetooth communication and barcode or QR code scanning.